Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society: 1780-1950. New York: Columbia University
P, 1958.

In the book, Williams argues that the idea of culture developed in response to the industrial revolution and the social and political changes that resulted from it. He believes that the idea of culture and the word itself with its modern uses began at this particular time. He tries to explain how the idea of culture was developed in 18th, 19th, and 20th century writing by looking at such British writers as Edmund Burke, Robert Southey, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, F. R, Leavis, and George Orwell. He believes that the earliest ideas developed in opposition to the laissez-faire society of the political economy. He sees the idea of culture as a ”whole way of life” and culture as a separation from society establishing the idea of perfection through the study of the arts. He contrasts the idea of “culture as art” and “culture as a whole way of life’ and seems to prefer the second viewpoint. He attempts to analyze the “structure of feeling” behind the intellectual thought and practice of “culture” and its evolution as a word with several conflicting and contradictory connotations in British society. He says the book is his interpretation of responses to the thoughts and feelings of the writers who have recorded the change. The book is divided into three parts: 19th century thinkers, 19th and 20th century writers, and 20th century writers.
In his introduction, Williams defines five words that he uses to illustrate the changes and shows the changes in the definitions of those words:
(1) The word industry undergoes a change in 1776 from a characteristic to a collective word for manufacturing and productive institutions. The rapid growth in the importance of these institutions creates the new economic system. Many technical changes transform the amount of production therefore changing society.
(2) The word democracy in 1776 came from the Greek word that meant “government by the people.” It is a part of a political vocabulary since the American and French Revolutions and now is used to show the struggle around the world for democratic representation.
(3) The word class in 1772 first meant the change from division or group in schools and colleges to a social sense of class. At first, there were just lower and higher classes then the middle class was added. Then a change developed in the character of the divisions and the attitudes toward them. There was also a change in social structures and social feelings.
(4) At first the word art referred to a human skill to an institution, a set body of activities of some kind. Then it went to the imaginative or creative arts. It developed to the idea of an imaginative truth and described a special person. Arts—literature, music, painting, sculpture, theatre—are now all grouped together and distinguished from other human skills.
(5) The word culture is the tending of the natural growth-process of human training. It first meant a general state of mind. Then it represented a state of intellectual development in society. It described a general body of arts. Now it describes a whole way of life—intellectual, spiritual, material. It can be used as a special kind of map to explore the nature of all other changes. It shows a recognition of moral and intellectual activities from a new kind of society and emphasizes these activities which are appealing to humans to be set over practical social government.
Williams sees English society as a victim of the cultural corruption of the industrial society and the English language changing by the “class-oriented rules of Standard English. He makes three observations in his critical observations of the writers: (1) English society before the 18th century had been caused by “organic” or physical change. (2) These English thinkers had been dealing with the upheaval created by industrialization and democracy. (3) The “culture” had provided these thinkers with a “court of appeal” and a “scale of integrity” for evaluating the “way of life” and “driven impulse” of the new kind of society that had been “reaching for control.”
He tries to defend a “democratic attitude” against “fear and hatred.” He feels that the 1958 democracy of England is “in danger,” that there is a “sullenness” and “withdrawal” which will end in the “unofficial democracy” of the “armed revolt” if these ideas are not dealt with. For Williams “a common culture” is not “at any level an equal culture,” but equality is very important. Societies without it are said “to depersonalize and degrade” and to raise “structures of cruelty and exploitation” that “crippled human energy.”
He tries to teach literature and related cultural forms as the culmination of a social process that involved a series of complex relationships between authorial ideology, institutional process, and generic/aesthetic form. The book shows culture began as ideas of perfections removed from material social life, as an analysis of large-scale changes involving industry, democracy, class, and art. In a class-divided society, “culture” is opposed to business, urban massification, and possessive individualism. For Williams, the idea of “common culture” is based on the creativity of millions of working-men and women included in the collective democratic institutions of trade unions, cooperatives, and other grass-roots resources of self-empowerment.
These are Williams’ views of cultural studies: (1) Culture as social processes and practices must be grounded in social relations of the systems of economics, politics, learning and communication, and generation and culture. (2) The historicizing of all cultural practices and processes stems from a need to grasp the ideology and politics of class-divided societies in late capitalism. (3) The consumptive/consumerist paradigm of capitalism, and the inequalities across ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, religion, and locality that it causes should be viewed by an approach based on solidarity. (4) The project of cultural studies is the use of knowledge to advance a democratic interaction of diverse communities with their specific historical experiences. (5) Cultural studies should be used to study all of today’s vital issues.
For Williams, culture is viewed as the basic part of an evolving social process. It is a way of life, the lived texture of any social order. Williams sees communication as an important part of culture because ideas, meanings, experiences, and activities are transmitted through language, in the form of certain communication rules, models, and conventions. Every society is different and creates its traditions and meanings through an ongoing and active process of negotiation and debate.