ABSTRACT
In one of his many striking aperçus, Walter Benjamin wrote of how every period ‘must strive anew to wrest tradition away from the conformism that is working to overpower it’; he further noted how the ‘only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious’ (Benjamin 2006: 391).1 Aside from simple recognition of the many ways in which the entire academic career of Raymond Williams – in books such as Culture and Society and The Country and the City – can be read as successfully instantiating just such a ‘wresting of the tradition away from conformism’ (the subtitle of Williams’ final essay collection, The Politics of Modernism, was Against the New Conformists), and underlining the consequent importance of Williams’ stress on the cultural and political dynamics of the ‘selective tradition’, we might return to Benjamin’s words from 1940 in order to ask just how safe from a demeaning or belittling conformism the legacy of Raymond Williams’ work is some twenty-odd years after his death?2
