ABSTRACT
Where did Williams see signs of hopefulness, and by which analytical processes did he strive to enable others to see them? The style of Williams’s analysis can be considered by thinking about the multiple signifieds of the word that figures in the title of the book: ‘resources’. For it became Williams’s methodological startingpoint to focus on a keyword whose meaning has been inflected differently by the many language formations that have appropriated it. Accordingly these essays invite us to think about the way in which the concept of resourcefulness figures in a range of social, economic and political domains: they focus on the resources derived from class and community alignments; the struggle over the material resources from which such structures of feeling have been produced (see for instance the essay of 1985, ‘Mining the meaning: key words in the Miners Strike’); and the organizational resources of British Labour and socialist politics. At the same time, it is characteristic that Williams should seek to draw attention to a powerful semantic constant in a word; if ‘resources’ means the materials, ideas and practices that are either residually present or emerging to satisfy demands, desires and needs, then what Williams sees in all cultural formations is this residual or emergent potential to develop a socialist society. As such the resources of hope for a socialist future that Williams wants us to recognize reside more in past and present forms of culture and politics than they do in utopia.
