A Socialist View of Mass Culture:

...He argues that rejection of social change, especially in the 19th century, led many critics to create artificial distinctions between the individual and society and restrictive definitions of culture and art...

...Williams then presents a series of case studies of historical changes in education, the reading public, communications media, literary forms, language and the social origins of writers from the invention of printing to the present...

...His magnificent concluding essay analyzed modern English society and rejected the masssociety critique...

...it suggested that if one viewed culture both as cultivation and a way of life, the working class was no less cultured than its social superiors...

...His solution to what he calls social poverty goes beyond John Kenneth Galbraith's proposals and calls for public ownership, which he feels has not been given a fair trial...

...The Long Revolution refers to the democratic, industrial and cultural revolutions that continue to transform English society...

...Like other Socialists on both sides of the ocean, he wishes to reduce the importance of family life and individual expression in favor of a greater sense of community, by enlarging the role of public facilities in everyday living...

...Most of Britain's critics and writers have looked askance at the country's transformation into an urban industrial society...

...In a concluding essay on Britain in the 1960s, Williams turns from cultural analysis to social policy...

...Williams shares the Socialists' confidence in the ability of an intellectual elite to change society in its own image, but it is doubtful whether the majority of his fellow citizens would accept the kind of culture he has in mind...

...He still leans too heavily on the conspiracy theory of modern popular culture, and his proposals fail to consider the possibility that modern developments in British society and culture reflect many of the values and preferences of the working and lower middle classes...

...Much of the same kind of critique developed in this country after the War, but it was countered quickly by a number of writers, notably Lyman Bryson, David Riesman, Reuel Denney and Nathan Glazer...

...Sociologists who have reached similar conclusions have had little impact on critics and scholars in the humanities, for between that branch of learning and the social sciences there exists a cultural gap almost as wide as that which C. P. Snow has observed between the humanities and the natural sciences...

...Not until after World War II did England develop the kind of consumer behavior and popular culture that has existed here for several decades...

...This solution is intended to raise the country's cultural level, and to reduce the danger of bureaucratic paralysis as well...

...They recognized only individual achievement in what we now call high culture, he maintains, and ignored the creative contributions of the working classes, especially in the development of social forms...

...The present volume, like his earlier book, is a series of separate essays, and both surfer from the discontinuities inherent in this form...

...One wishes only that Williams had presented his argument in a more systematic fashion...

...The final essay is especially deserving of American attention because of the poverty of recent American Socialist thinking...

...Reviewed by Herbert J. Gans Assistant professor of city planning, University of Pennsylvania Although the Industrial Revolution began in England, only in the 20th century did the large English working class and a growing lower middle class begin to enjoy the level of economic security and material comfort that has long been taken for granted in the United States...

...It is only recently, too, that these classes have achieved sufficient power and status to make their preferences felt in the market place of goods and ideas...

...In an earlier book, Culture and Society, 1780-1950, Williams described the intolerantly class-bound view of the Industrial Revolution held by many of England's major literary figures...

...In England, where social stratification is more rigid, the scorn of the upper and middle classes—and their writers—for the lower classes is much more intense...

...They urged us to understand popular culture and its audiences, and to foreswear blind attacks in favor of a more balanced view...

...This is elaborated in his new book...

...The mass media are to be publicly owned, too, but held in trust for the creative artists and producers who will run them...

...This shortcoming does not invalidate his proposals, but it suggests that he needs to hew more closely to the present wishes and future aspirations of the major English public...

...As a result, the call for a balanced view is both a more radical and a more courageous step than it was in the United States...

...That it has finally been voiced must be credited largely to the writings of Raymond Williams...

...The growth of popular culture is ascribed to Americanization and to a conspiracy by greedy and unscrupulous entrepreneurs who have subverted a dull but honest working class away from its folk tradition by creating a mass society with a corresponding mass-produced culture...

...Since Williams' approach begins with literature rather than society, his books may be able to breach the cultural gap...

...He deplores the increasing economic, political and cultural centralization, as well as the growing emphasis on individual consumption, and calls for the deliberate planning of an open democratic society with greater citizen participation in major decisions and more public investment...

...Williams is most interested in the cultural aspect, but stresses that changes in culture must be seen in relation to the political structure, the class system and the economic system...

...The author writes from the point of view of a literary critic, but draws considerably on the concepts of modern sociology—especially the sociology of knowledge—and on the cultural relativism of anthropology...

...The Long Revolution addresses itself only to England, but it is also quite relevant to the American scene...

...He highlights the evolving relationships between these institutions, their audiences and the overall social structure, and indicates that in every era the dominant critics viewed each new literary form as vulgar or evil, only to have it become part of respectable culture at a later time...

...Williams' proposals update traditional Socialist solutions in an imaginative and eclectic fashion, but they do not take into account sufficiently the conclusions of his earlier analyses...