Work · Socialism, Anarchism, Marxism & Critical Theory
Culture and Society 1780–1950
From Burke and Cobbett through Mill, Carlyle, Arnold, Ruskin and Morris to Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, Leavis and Orwell: how the idea of culture became a court of appeal against industrial society, as culture, industry, democracy, class and art changed meaning.
Introduction
Williams published “Culture and Society 1780–1950” in 1958. The foreword names five words – industry, democracy, class, art and culture – whose meanings changed in the decades around 1800 and which together record a response to the industrial revolution. In a series of portraits, from Burke, Cobbett and the Romantic poets through Mill, Carlyle, Newman, Arnold, Ruskin and Morris to D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis and Orwell, he showed how “culture” became both an idea of human perfection and a court of appeal against industrial society. The conclusion contrasts bourgeois individualism with the working-class idea of solidarity and argues for a common culture. Stuart Hall later counted the book among the founding texts of cultural studies.
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