of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon.’ So no methodology here, thank you; only sincere and vital emotion. But who decides the sincerity and vitality? If you need to ask that you couldn’t begin to understand the answer. People decide it, in themselves and in an active and collaborative critical process.
But which people, in what social relationships, with each other and with others? That, at whatever risk of damnation, is the necessary question of the sociologist. Practical criticism is vulnerable at several points: in its hardening into an apparently objective method which is based, even defiantly, on subjective principles; in its isolation of texts from contexts; in its contemplative aspects, which have often made it hostile to new literary work. But all these weaknesses are most apparent, we say, when it is badly done: well or badly being again an internal criterion. In fact, however, all these weaknesses, or potential weaknesses, follow from the specific social situation of its practitioners. The real answer to that question—which people, in what social relationships?—was, as we know, precise and even principled: the informed critical minority. What began as the most general kind of claim, a visibly human process centred on the apparently absolute qualities of sincerity and vitality, ended, under real pressures, as a self-defining group. But then, because the critical activity was real, very different social relations—a sense of isolation from the main currents of a civilization in which sincerity and vitality were being limited or destroyed, an implacable opposition to all agents of this limitation or destruction—emerged and forced a generalization of the original position. English literary sociology began, in effect, from this need of a radical critical group to locate and justify its own activity and identity: the practical distinction of good literature from the mediocre and the bad extending to studies of the cultural conditions underlying these differences of value—a critical history of literature and of culture; and then further extending, from its starting-point in critical activity, to one major element of these conditions, the nature of the reading public. The particular interpretation then given was of course one of cultural decline; the radical isolation of the critical minority was in that sense both starting-point and conclusion. But any theory of cultural decline, or to put it more neutrally, of cultural crisis—and the practical critics had little difficulty in establishing that—acquires, inevitably, wider social explanation: in this case the destruction of an organic society by industrialism and by mass civilization.
In the 1930s this kind of diagnosis overlapped, or seemed to overlap, with other radical interpretations, and especially perhaps, with the Marxist interpretation of the effects of capitalism. Yet almost at once there was a fundamental hostility between these two groups: a critical engagement between Scrutiny and the English Marxists, which we can have little doubt, looking back, Scrutiny won. But why was this so? That the Scrutiny critics were much closer to literature, were not just fitting it in, rather hastily, to a theory conceived from other kinds, mainly economic kinds, of evidence? I believe this was so, but the real reason was more fundamental. Marxism, as then commonly understood, was weak in just the decisive area where practical criticism was strong: in its capacity to give precise and detailed and reasonably adequate accounts of actual consciousness: not just a scheme or a generalization but actual works, full of rich and significant and specific experience. And the reason for the corresponding weakness in Marxism is not difficult to find: it lay in the received formula of base and superstructure, which in ordinary hands converted very quickly to an interpretation of superstructure as simple reflection, representation, ideological expression—simplicities which just will not survive any prolonged experience of actual works. It was the theory and practice of reductionism—the specific human experiences and acts of creation converted so quickly and mechanically into classifications which always found their ultimate reality and significance elsewhere—which in practice left the field open to anybody who could give an account of art which in its closeness and intensity at all corresponded to the real human dimension in which works of art are made and valued.
I have said there was a victory, and it was indeed so crushing that in England, for a generation, even the original questions could hardly be raised. Teachers and students already knew, or thought they knew, the answers. Still today, I have no doubt, the work of Lukács or of Goldmann can be quickly referred to that abandoned battlefield. What have these neo-Marxists got, after all, but a slightly updated vocabulary and a new political lease of life? I think they have more, much more, but I am sure we must remember that decisive engagement, for certain real things were learned in it, which make the specifically English contribution to the continuing inquiry still relevant, still active, however much any of us might want to join in the run from the English consensus to a quite other consciousness and vocabulary.
The Social Totality
It was above all, as I have said, the received formula of base and superstructure which made Marxist accounts of literature and thought often weak in practice. Yet to many people, still, this formula is near the centre of Marxism, and indicates its appropriate methodology for cultural history and criticism, and then of course for the relation between social and cultural studies. The economic base determines the social relations which determine consciousness which determines actual ideas and works. There can be endless debate about each of these terms, but unless something very like that is believed, Marxism appears to have lost its most specific challenging position.
Now for my own part I have always opposed the formula of base and superstructure: not primarily because of its methodological weaknesses but because of its rigid, abstract and static character. Further, from my work on the nineteenth century, I came to view it as essentially a bourgeois formula; more specifically, a central position of utilitarian thought. I did not want to give up my sense of the commanding importance of economic activity and history. My inquiry in Culture and Society had begun from just that sense of a transforming change. But in theory and practice I came to believe that I had to give up, or at least to leave aside, what I knew as the Marxist tradition: to attempt to develop a different kind of theory of social totality; to see the study of culture as the study of relations between elements in a whole way of life; to find ways of studying structure, in particular works and periods, which could stay in touch with and illuminate particular art-works and forms, but also forms and relations of more general social life; to replace the formula of base and superstructure with the more active idea of a field of mutually if also unevenly determining forces. That was the project of The Long Revolution, and it seems to me extraordinary, looking back, that I did not then know the work of Lukács or of Goldmann, which would have been highly relevant to it, and especially as they were working within a more conscious tradition and in less radical an isolation. I did not even then know, or had forgotten, Marx’s analysis of the theory of utility, in The German Ideology, in which—as I now find often happens in reading and re-reading Marx—what I had felt about the reductionism of the base-superstructure formula was given a very precise historical and analytic focus.
This being so, it is easy to imagine my feelings when I discovered an active and developed Marxist theory, in the work of Lukács and Goldmann, which was exploring many of the same areas with many of the same concepts, but also with others in a quite different range. The fact that I learned simultaneously that it had been denounced as heretical, that it was a return to Left Hegelianism, left-bourgeois idealism, and so on, did not, I am afraid, detain me. If you’re not in a church you’re not worried about heresies; it is only (but it is often) the most routinized Marxism, or the most idealist revolutionism, which projects that kind of authoritative, believing, formation. The only serious criterion was actual theory and practice.
What both Lukács and, following him, Goldmann had to say about reification seemed to me the real advance. For here the dominance of economic activity over all other forms of human activity, the dominance of its values over all other values, was given a precise historical explanation: that this dominance, this deformation, was the specific characteristic of capitalist society, and that in modern organized capitalism this dominance—as indeed one can observe—was increasing, so that this reification, this false objectivity, was more thoroughly penetrating every other kind of life and consciousness. The idea of totality
