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Justice is neither done nor seen to be done in this model. But the crime and
the hurt receive public acknowledgment, and with today’s electronic media
covering the hearings, the perpetrators endure the glare of publicity as they
wear their disgrace. At least a greater proportion of evil-doers are likely to get
nailed this way, than the tiny percentage of perpetrators who suffered any
consequences for their part in the Holocaust.

Higgins is probably right that it is a more attractive and realistic way

of getting past what has been done than a ‘ rule of law’ whose trials are
clearly designed not to get at the truth, much less justice (as the Barbie and
Papon trials have recently shown). But I suspect that, after reading the litera-
ture, Higgins hangs on to such alternatives that provide no justice for victims
less from conviction than from his religious views. These would prevent his
giving a green light to the solution of extra-legal revenge, so manifest in
post-war Jewish victims’ responses to the failure of the rule of law. Even
Arendt, who criticized the Eichmann trial because it was clearly illegal,
suggested that such criminals should simply be killed. Maybe if we
considered the need for revenge in victims we would understand much
better the psychology of a Rabin who purportedly chanted Ezekiel’s lines –
‘And the enemy shall know I am the Lord when I can lay down my
vengeance on them’ – after every funeral for victims of ‘terrorist’ attacks. And
there’s the rub: his ‘terrorist’ might be my ‘righteous man’.

Reviewed by Alastair Davidson

Human Rights, University of Wollongong
email: email: alastair@uow.edu.au

Paul Jones, Raymond Williams’ Sociology of Culture: A Critical

Reconstruction (Palgrave, 2004).

In Wystan Auden’s fine phrase, on that dark cold day in January 1939
W.B. Yeats ‘became his admirers’. But death can play tricks with time, and
with admirers. Some reputations last: eulogized by Auden eight months after
Yeats, Freud’s covens pullulate today in university departments of social and
cultural theory (though no longer in science or medicine). Some reputations
fail to survive their earliest admirers’ demise: who reads Hobhouse? Never
burning brightly in life, some reputations smoulder then burst into flame:
who, contemplating that self-poisoned corpse on the French/Spanish border
in 1940, would have invested in the modern Walter Benjamin industry? Like
Talcott Parsons at sundry Burkes’ and Hares’ soiled hands, some reputations
die then hover perpetually on resurrection’s margin.
Where does Raymond Williams fit in this litany? For an unobtrusive
measure, I checked my university’s library catalogue. Twelve volumes of
critical comment there, and every one of them on the shelves in the middle
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of term. Not a good sign. Whatever else one might say about him, it is clear
that Williams is no fashionable figure 16 years after he died. Those 12
volumes differ strikingly in tone and focus, reflecting this man’s Protean
nature. Earning his first academic crust teaching literature to working-class
adult students, he earned his second by professing drama to juvenile
Cambridge parasites (and a steady stream of meritocrats like Terry Eagleton).
He wrote novels, of uneven quality. He was immensely productive, churning
out critical literary studies, fiction, social criticism, political polemic, and a
flood of fugitive reviews and comments. He was a central figure in the old
New Left, and engaged gleefully in fraternal mud-slinging with its newer
sibling. For better or worse, he was a (perhaps the) founding father for
cultural studies. Never working outside Britain, he remained remarkably
open to influences from elsewhere yet never succumbed to mere intellec-
tual surfing.
For embattled British leftists, Williams’ sudden death in 1988 seemed a
disaster. Reeling under echt Thatcherism’s hammer blows rather than today’s
faintly pink-tinged Blairite handbag swipes, and lacking the economic nous
with which to respond to that assault, Williams’ increasingly open interest in
Marxist approaches to culture had seemed a promisingly sneaky way for
these souls to sap the enemy position. Now Saint Raymond of Pandy was
dead, the British Left bereft and gormless. Scholars faced a different problem
in coming to terms with his demise, for (given his range of interest and expo-
sition) it never was easy to grasp Williams’ work in its entirety. Most critics
chose to emphasize just one part. Rooted in adult education, Fred Inglis’
biography (1995) took Williams’ central value to lie in his humane progres-
sivism, in his celebration of a common culture rooted in personal experience
of the injuries of class, of army life in wartime and of his postwar employ-
ment as an academically-despised university extramural lecturer. (In their
somewhat different ways, Raymond Hoggart and E. P. Thompson also could
be recruited to this project.) Several other studies analysed Williams’ critical
career as a long march through the English faculty, from semi-attachment to
T. S. Eliot’s egregiously patrician reading of Matthew Arnold to the wilder
shores of popular culture. Politics are highlighted in some of these studies
– notably in John Higgins’ somewhat carping Raymond Williams: Literature,
Marxism and Cultural Materialism (1999) – but downplayed elsewhere.
Now comes Paul Jones, carrying his rather different spear.
A refugee in New South Wales from what a Glaswegian friend always
called ‘the Centre for Contemptuous Cultural Studies’ at Birmingham
University, Jones has abandoned cultural studies for sociology. Apparently
maturing over the whole 16 years since his subject died, his book constructs
Williams as a much more coherent social theorist than others have suggested.
The precise form which his ideas took changed and developed as events
and others’ ideas impinged on him, to be sure; but in this account a firm
theoretical core sustained Williams’ lifelong intellectual commitment to
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128 Thesis Eleven (Number 80 2005)

emancipatory democracy. There is much to admire here. Jones has read very
deeply in Williams’ work and in commentators’ judgements on that work.
Adroitly, he teases out similarities and differences not only between Williams’
writings over time but also with contemporaneous social theorists. Thus
Jones usefully collides Williams against a range of other luminaries: Gramsci,
Adorno, Benjamin, Bourdieu, Habermas. (Thank God, for once Foucault is
scarcely visible.) Much of this material is presented in tabular form; students
revising for examinations will find this particularly helpful. By highlighting
Williams’ later critical work, most notably The Sociology of Culture (1981),
Jones also goes some way to redressing other critics’ privileging earlier books
– most notably The Long Revolution (1961).
While recognizing his book’s excellence on its own terms, this
early/late formulation gestures to the point where I part company with Paul
Jones; for this is not the first time that we have seen ‘early’ X set against ‘late’
Y. While it claims to eschew Althusserian formulations, a strong whiff of
theoretical practice hangs about this book. Things here are black or white,
not shades of grey. The cultural studies Jones abandoned is uniformly black,
the sociology he joined brilliant white. (Even here questions arise though: it
seems that in 1981 Britain, ‘contemporary sociological orthodoxy [was] domi-
nated by the conservative and somewhat moribund legacy of (Parsonian)
functionalism’ (p. 128). Not where I lived, it wasn’t.) Similarly, good-hearted
but feeble-minded socialist humanism, ‘the myth of Raymond Hoggart’
(passim) is black, Williams’ fumblings towards Habermassian emancipatory
democracy wholly white. This is a profoundly teleological book, with earlier
work valued to the degree that it anticipates a later ‘mature’ (perhaps sliding,
with Althusser, to ‘scientific’) sociology of culture.
As so often with commentaries on this man (John and Lizzie Eldridge’s
Raymond Williams: Making Connections (1994) is the admirable exception),
the problem with Jones’ book concerns not what he includes but what he
leaves out. Teleology strips his subject’s work to a steely core capable of
attracting admiration from social theorists who think their subject fawning
kin to philosophy, with criteria of excellence centred on logical consistency.
But while philosophers hitherto have sought to understand the world, the
point is to change it. Jones genuflects to this principle by honouring the
notion of emancipation, but then his theoretical practice prevents him from
putting that principle into effect. Freeing the working class from exploitation
comes to resemble a family car removed from its garage each Sunday for a
wash and polish, then pushed back again until Auntie Flo comes for a visit
at some unspecified future date. But cars are for driving around in so that
we may go to places and look at things, not just objects for a weekly polish.
As his range of published work shows, Raymond Williams knew this very
well. His car rarely sat in its garage. Critics almost always want to set Williams
at the centre of something, but he was much more interesting and produc-
tive when exploring margins.
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This is rooted in biography, of course. Despite his own surname, one

thing which Paul Jones never notices is that Raymond Williams was Welsh.
He was born at Pandy in Monmouthshire, the son of a railway signalman.
Jones’ text and meticulous bibliography are worryingly incomplete since
neither recognizes that Williams wrote fiction: but his fiction is continuous
with his literary studies, and with his social criticism. The first novel, Border
Country (1960), was a lightly-fictionalized account of Williams’ own upbring-
ing. This is a world of edges: the Great Western Railway’s industrial workers
against a dominant small-scale local agriculture; deep country against Pandy’s
and Abergavenny’s artisans and traders; class against community in the 1926
General Strike; Wales against England; working-class material constraint
against patrician splendour when the Raymond-figure wins a scholarship to
Cambridge (a town memorably apostrophized in Williams’ essay ‘My
Cambridge’ as ‘the rudest place in the world’). His next novel, Second Gener-
ation (1964), refracted Williams’ experience as an extramural lecturer. This
is a university novel set (like far too many others) in Oxford. But this is a
unique fictive Oxford, with a deep caesura separating a proletarianized world
centred on the Cowley car factories from fictionally familiar and conven-
tionally indolent dons, undergraduates and colleges. In the third novel in the
Border Country trilogy, The Fight for Manod (1979), Williams used the
creation of a new town in Wales’ empty middle (a place clearly modelled
on Newtown, Montgomeryshire) to explore social and political edges not
only between Welsh and English but also between the local, the national and
the supranational; and to ponder whether large scale capitalist development
now ever might be tamed through state action. Though less impressive than
Border Country as a work of imaginative literature, this book ought to
interest Paul Jones – for one main character is a sociologist. This is sociology
of culture on the hoof.
As all this suggests, while open to European theoretical influences
Raymond Williams always kept a close eye on local events. Class often struc-
tured those events, but so did ethnicity. His last years as a university teacher,
and his few years in retirement, saw Williams returning to where he began.
Giving his usual fraternally critical welcome to a Left-inflected Welsh
nationalism, his late essay ‘Wales and England’, written a generation after
Border Country, identified new edges visible from Pandy: dying industrial
southern valleys against Wales’ empty middle; Anglo-Wales against a resur-
gent Welsh-speaking culture centred on Gwynedd’s mountain massif. Nestled
at the foot of the Black Mountains, Pandy gave Williams a place from which
to view the world, if not a fulcrum against which to move it. Paul Jones
mourns that Williams’ death robbed us of The Politics of Modernism. I mourn
the loss of the third volume in his People of the Black Mountains trilogy. In
the two books which we do possess, Williams interlards episodes of fiction
with chunks of well-digested social history, conjuring the texture of lived
experience (to court charges of Raymond Hoggartism) in millennia since his
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130 Thesis Eleven (Number 80 2005)

natal district’s first human settlement. These novels built directly from the
method of The Country and the City – the book which, as a sociologist turned
social historian, I think Williams’ greatest achievement. The first two People
of the Black Mountains volumes took this district’s story from Palaeolithic
times to the 15th century defeat of Owain Glyndwr, and the consequent
eclipse of Welsh princeship in anything but its current limp Saxe-
Coburg-Gotha deformation. As his widow explained in an afterword to the
trilogy’s second book, The Eggs of the Eagle (1990), the unwritten third book
would have traced Black Mountains people’s social experience from the Wars
of the Roses to the present day, traversing that broad terrain on which
Williams previously had written so incisively in such a bewildering range of
forms. This would have been a fitting peak to his work – setting Raymond
Williams figuratively on the Cat’s Back, gazing over a landscape jumping with
allusion to real rights and wrongs done to real people in real time. There is
another Raymond Williams here who eludes us.

Reviewed by Ian Carter

Sociology, University of Auckland
email: ir.carter@auckland.ac.nz

John Lechte, Key Contemporary Concepts: From Abjection to Zeno’s

Paradox (Sage, 2003); Ross Abbinnett, Culture and Identity: Critical
Theories (Sage, 2003); Jean-Marc Coicaud, Legitimacy and Politics: A
Contribution to the Study of Political Right and Political Responsibility
(Cambridge University Press, 2002)

In his Keywords, Raymond Williams (1976: 76) observed that ‘culture’

was one of the two or three most difficult words in the English language.
For him, culture, referring to art and society (as a ‘whole way of life’), was
pivotal in the vocabulary of the period. Culture remains axial in these three
books – Lechte examining the new ‘cluster’ – the ‘particular set of interrelated
. . . words and meanings’ – that characterizes the cultural/societal configur-
ation of the present; Abbinnett exploring postmodern orientations to ques-
tions of culture, identity, and belonging; and Coicaud seeking to accent the
dimensions of norms and meanings in questions of political legitimacy.
John Lechte’s Key Contemporary Concepts looks explicitly to Keywords
as forerunner in its distillation of the fundamental terms of the period. It is
interesting, then, as a start, to note the way in which Lechte tackles ‘culture’.
He tracks the way in which anthropological conceptions have challenged the
notion of culture as tacked on to the so-called material; and he considers
culture as differentiated into high and popular, developed from the Enlighten-
ment and attached to the notion of cultivation. This is a condensed entry, but
one that elegantly maps the main issues at stake. Such can be said for the