ABSTRACT
The principal "documentary" sources of F. R. Leavis's conception of the organic society are two books, Change in the Village and The Wheelwrights Shop, descriptions of rural life immediately before the full emergence of the Industrial Revolution by a contemporary observer and participant, George Bourne. Leavis, writing sixty years later with the knowledge and experience of the Industrial Revolution, looks toward Bourne as offering a viable model for the cultural life. Literature, the quintessential expression of language, continues to retain the structure and character of organic society. The organic society is an antiprogressive model, not simply because it belongs to an earlier time, but also because organicism with its seasonal aspect conceives of change through renewal, the recovery of existing or preexisting vitalities. Edmund Burke speaks of the organic society as "a condition of unchangeable constancy, moving on through the varied tenour of perpetual decay, fall, renovation and progression".
