Culture and Politics

Raymond Williams was a pioneering scholar of culture and society, and one of the outstanding intellectuals of the twentieth century. In this, a collection of difficult to find essays, some of which are published for the first time, Williams emerges as not only one of the great writers of materialist criticism, but also a thoroughly engaged political writer. Published to coincide with the centenary of his birth and showing the full range of his work, from his early writings on art and society, to later work on ecosocialism and the politics of modernism, Culture and Politics is Williams at both his most accessible and his most penetrating. The collection – which includes a new introductory essay on Williams by the book’s editor Phil O’Brien – shows an extraordinary range of topics from portraits of Herbert Read and Pierre Bourdieu, the future of work, the meanings of Marxism and modernism, the possibilities for socialist advance, as well as the history of working-class literature and culture in postwar Britain. Culture and Politics is an essential book for all those interested in the politics of culture in the twentieth century, and how Raymond Williams allowed us to see why popular culture mattered.