Raymond Williams and the Problem of Ideology

Abstract

last time I saw Raymond Williams speak was in a social history seminar given at King's College, Cambridge. His topic seemed at first ironic in that context: the Bloomsbury group, in the college most associated with them; but the transformation of that irony into something more serious is what I want to record here as a way of introducing the seriousness of Williams's work. His voice was remarkable: the voice of an authority. It was conversational, almost to the point of dullness, but sustained throughout by that curiously academic power, the intellectually cautious assertion of the radical. His final judgement on the Bloomsbury group was damning: The social conscience, in the end, is to protect the private consciousness. A questioner asked how he could bear to study such an awful group of people, and Williams replied, with a vivid ferocity, that it was a necessary task because that same kind of cultural fraction was still so powerful an enemy. tone of that reply did not belong to the conventional smoothness of an academic discourse: it held instead the necessary anger of the political. It was, in the Cambridge context, quite refreshing. It is precisely that tone which you have to imagine if you are to understand the seriousness of Williams's assertion in Politics and Letters: If you look at the implied relationships of nearly all the books I have written, I have been arguing with what I take to be official English culture. In this essay I want to ex-