Abstract

Raymond Williams is widely acknowledged as one of the most original and influential cultural thinkers of the post-war era, and this essay aims to analyze/critique the cultural theories he advances in both Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961), his early major works generally acclaimed as two of the founding texts of British cultural studies. As Williams claimed, his Culture and Society was "oppositonal." What he opposed was F.R. Leavis's elitist concept of culture, which, obviously, derives from Matthew Arnold's famous definition in Culture and Anarchy that culture contains "the best that has been thought and known in the world." The very function that Arnold would have culture to perform is to "seek to do away with classes;" culture, in this high-brow sense, serves instead to separate and exclude, for a vast majority of human population, e.g, the working class and the farming laborers, is not counted at all in the daily production of values and meanings. To counteract this long traditional thinking about culture and society, Williams proposed that "culture is ordinary," for culture refers to the whole way of life, a proposition later taken up by the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University as its very subject position from which it targets the official culture.

KeyWords: culture , society , cultural studies , left-Leavism,Marxism,borderconsciousness , community , experience , totality , base & superstructure , structure of feeling,representation,medievalism,Romantic populism,determinism,culturalmaterialism,binary, hegemony ,dominant , emergent , residual