ABSTRACT
Raymond Williams, who died in January 1988 at the age of 66, and who had been until his retirement Professor of Drama at Cambridge University, is perhaps the single most important ‘left-wing’ figure in postwar British intellectual life. Formed by the biographical experience of Welsh working-class life, Williams was also a lifelong socialist: very briefly a member of the British Communist Party, a Labour Party supporter during the 1950s and 1960s, an enthusiast for various New Left causes and, in his last years, a fairly close associate of the left-inclined Welsh nationalist party, Plaid Cymru. A common culture may properly exist, but it is nonetheless desirable, moreover, it provides for Williams, as it had for Eliot and for Leavis, the essential theoretical ground from which to mount an organicist critique of utilitarian individualism. Gramsci’s central achievement consists in the articulation of a culturalist sense of the wholeness of culture with a typically Marxist sense of the interestedness of ideology.
