ABSTRACT
In the chapter on ‘Individuals and Societies’ in The Long Revolution Williams reviews, as part of the ‘imaginative sociology of his own’ (the phrase was Stuart Hampshire’s), a series of possible roles through which people live in society. To such obliging positions as ‘members’, ‘subject’, ‘servant’, he adds ‘rebel’, ‘exile’ and ‘vagrant’. Noting that exile usually means those, like D.H.Lawrence, who leave home because it no longer is home, and refuse to return until it is transformed as he wants it to be, Williams says ‘an equally characteristic modern figure is the self-exile’, or as the Bolsheviks had it, ‘an internal emigré which lives and moves about in his native society, but rejects its purposes and despises its values, because of alternative principles to which his whole personal reality is committed’. 1 He is urgent for change, this figure, but his dissent is fixed as part of the definition of his separateness. So he cannot join with others. (As Lawrence wrote in one of his letters, ‘I will be wary, beyond words, of joining’.) This rebel, in Williams’s brief definition, he aligns more or less with the revolutionary, who opposes the society in terms of the struggle for a different society. 2
