in the emergence of English cultural criticism: Arnold’s response to the popular agitation of the late 1860s. Then follow a group of three studies in cultural theory: a tribute to Lucien Goldmann that discusses his work and meditates on its complex relations with received intellectual traditions in England; a re-examination of the concept of ‘base and superstructure’; and a theoretical analysis of means of communication. The next group of three essays is devoted to the problem of ‘nature’, as represented in the dominant humanist tradition; in the ideological formations, past and present, of Social Darwinism; and in the writings of the Italian Marxist Sebastiano Timpanaro. A fourth section brings together five concrete studies dealing successively with English naturalist theatre; the Bloomsbury group; advertising; utopianism and science fiction; and the Welsh industrial novelists. These exemplify the analytic programme of cultural theory.
Politics is the keynote of the fifth and last section of the volume. Here Williams reflects on the problematic history of Marxism in post-war Britain and on his own relation to it, and then, in a concluding essay on Rudolf Bahro’s Alternative, turns to consider the state of ‘actually existing socialism’–the comparable blockages of the instituted social order in the East and of the movement in the West–and to project a course beyond it, through the theory and practice of ‘cultural revolution’.
NLB
The essays now collected in this volume were first published as follows: A Hundred Years of Culture and Anarchy in The Spokesman, 8, December 1970, based on a lecture given in Manchester in April 1969; Literature and Sociology: in Memory of Lucien Goldmann in New Left Review, 67, May-June 1971, based on a lecture given in Cambridge in April 1971; Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory in New Left Review, 82, November-December 1973, based on a lecture given in Montreal in April 1973; Means of Communication as Means of Production in Prilozi: Drustvenost Komunikacije, Zagreb, 1978; Ideas of Nature in Ecology: the Shaping Inquiry (ed. J. Benthall), Longman, 1972, based on a lecture given at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, in 1971; Social Darwinism in The Limits of Human Nature (ed. J. Benthall), Allen Lane, 1973, based on a lecture given at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, in 1972; Problems of Materialism in New Left Review, 109, May-June 1978; Social Environment and Theatrical Environment in English Drama: Forms and Development (ed. M. Axton and R. Williams), Cambridge University Press, 1977; The Bloomsbury Fraction in Keynes and the Bloomsbury Group (ed. D. Crabtree and A.P. Thirlwall), Macmillan, 1980, based on a lecture given in Canterbury in 1978; Advertising: the Magic System, originally written as a chapter in The Long Revolution (1961), withdrawn from that book for inclusion in a collective book on advertising which in the event was not published, then published in part in New Left Review, 4, July-August 1960 (the Afterword to this essay was published in The Listener, 31 July, 1969); Utopia and Science Fiction in Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 5 (1978), Montreal, and in Science Fiction: a Critical Guide (ed. P. Parrinder), Longman, 1979; The Welsh Industrial Novel, University College Press, Cardiff, 1979, based on the inaugural Gwyn Jones lecture given in Cardiff, April 1978; Notes on Marxism in Britain since 1945 in New Left Review, 100, November 1976-January 1977; Beyond Actually Existing Socialism in New Left Review, 120, March-April 1980. I have taken the opportunity to revise all the essays for this volume.
R.W.
A Hundred Years of Culture and Anarchy
In the late sixties several issues came together. Issues and controversies. About parliament, about law and the trade unions, about demonstrations and public order, about education and its expansion. In the late eighteen-sixties, I mean. In the years when George Eliot began Middlemarch, when Marx published the first volume of Capital, when Carlyle wrote Shooting Niagara, and Matthew Arnold wrote the lectures and articles which became Culture and Anarchy.
In our own late sixties the spirit of Arnold is often invoked, especially in the universities. He has been taken as a kind of patron of things like the Black Papers: in some ways astonishingly, for all his working life he was a hardworking inspector of education and the most effective exponent of the need for a new system of secondary schooling. Nevertheless, the invocation is neither accidental nor wholly misguided. Arnold’s emphasis on culture—his kind of emphasis—was a direct response to the social crisis of those years, and what he saw as opposed to culture was anarchy, in a sense very similar to many recent public descriptions of demonstrations and the protest movement. He did not see or present himself as a reactionary, but as a guardian of excellence and of humane values. That, then as now, was the strength of his appeal.
What then was the actual crisis? In immediate terms it was an argument about the franchise: that the right to vote should be extended to working-class men in the towns. Not, it now seems, so very radical a proposal. Just a hundred years later that hard-won right is part of our ‘immemorial’ democratic traditions. But at the time it was critical. In 1866 the first form of the bill was defeated and the Liberal government fell. The campaign was taken to the country by the Reform League. The meetings in London were especially large. The only suitable places for such large meetings were the parks, but the authorities argued that these were royal gifts for public recreation; mass demonstrations, on the other hand, were a form of public nuisance. The right to meet in Hyde Park—now, a century later, another part of our ‘immemorial’ democratic tradition—was especially at issue. Where the gentry rode in Rotten Row crowds often gathered, and there was a proposal to jam it with ten thousand costermongers and their donkeys. Then the Reform League announced a meeting in Hyde Park for the evening of Monday July 23, 1866. The Home Secretary ordered the Commissioner of Police to post notices closing the gates at teatime. Questions were asked in Parliament by several members, including, notably, John Stuart Mill, author of the Essay on Liberty. Disraeli, the Prime Minister, reassured the Queen.
On July 23 some sixty thousand workers, from many parts of the country, marched down Oxford Street and Edgware Road to converge at the Marble Arch. The police were drawn up at the locked gates. The leaders of the march demanded entry and were refused. Most of the march then went on to Trafalgar Square. But one group stayed at Hyde Park and started taking down the railings. Many of the watching crowd joined them. They took down about a mile of railings, and went into the park. It has been said that flowerbeds were trampled, that people ‘raced over the forbidden turf’, and that stones were thrown at some large houses in Belgravia. There seems no reason to doubt any of this. As with the proposal to ride donkeys in Rotten Row, it was testing the question ‘whether this or any other portion of Hyde Park belongs to a class or to the entire people’. Troops were called out, but before they got there everybody had gone home.
Hyde Park. Grosvenor Square. We have to update the names to get any idea of the response. The moderate leaders of the Reform League saw the Home Secretary and asked for a meeting in Hyde Park the following Monday, to establish the right of free assembly. He is reported to have wept and agreed, but he was then overruled by the Cabinet. A confrontation seemed probable, for many ordinary members wanted to go ahead with the meeting. Mill intervened, putting the question:
if the position of affairs has become such that a revolution was desirable, and if they thought themselves able to accomplish one.
After argument it was agreed to hold the meeting instead in the Agricultural Hall, Islington. It was a crowded and noisy meeting. Thousands could not get in. The need for the park was obvious, but the government, through a new Home Secretary, now introduced a bill making meetings in Hyde Park illegal. Mill led the opposition to this, and by the end of the session the bill
