Raymond Williams and The Country and the City

Beskyof scholarship offers a way to examine and narrate the totality of capitalism, including imperialism, without being totalizing.In other words, while capitalism and its formative contradictions may be inescapable, its contradictions are not experienced the same way everywhere.Like any good ethnographer, Williams was committed to the particularities of place and time.He was also committed to a Marxism and a socialism that emphasize continuity and relationality over rupture and causality.The Country and the City can be rewardingly re-read from different standpoints.This essay is written from just one-broadly, that of agrarian studies-but my hope is to provoke others to revisit Williams. Position, perspective, and structures of feelingWilliams was explicit about how his own biography informed The Country and the City.He grew up in the Black Mountains on the Welsh-English border, the son of a Welsh railway worker with strong ties to the socialist prewar Labour Party.Williams studied English literature at Cambridge, where he became a member of the Communist Party, even co-authoring a party pamphlet with historian Eric Hobsbawm (Williams 1979, 42).After serving in World War II, he returned to Cambridge and received his degree in 1946.Though he remained a committed socialist, he did not reenroll in the Communist Party.After graduating, he taught nighttime adult education classes in Sussex, where he began writing novels and published Culture and Society (1958b).In 1961, he returned to Cambridge as a faculty member in the Department of English.His writings from the 1950s and 1960s are associated with the emergence of the British New Left and the critical approaches of "