Raymond Williams on
the “Individual", "Society", and “Class”
The following passages are from Raymond Williams’
The
Long Revolution (1961, pp. 76-8, 94, 95-6). Williams,
a literary critic, was among the most respected cultural historians and
critics writing in English, and a creative and lucid Marxist. His
works are regarded as central influences on the founding of the new field
called “cultural studies”. As evidenced in his
Keywords (1976),
and in the passages below, he has long been concerned with the history
and nature of the modern conception of humanity and society. Among
anthropologists, only Louis Dumont (Homo Hierarchicus , From
Mandeville to Marx, and Essays on Individualism) has made a
similar effort to unwind the history of the modern European conception
of the individual.
Thus we can trace our concept of 'the individual'
to that complex of change which we analyse in its separable aspects as
the Renaissance, the Reformation, the beginnings of capitalist economy.
In essence it is the abstraction of the individual from the complex of
relationships by which he had hitherto been normally defined. The counterpart
of this process was a similar abstraction of 'society', which had
earlier indicated an actual relationship -- 'the society of his fellows'
-- but which in the late sixteenth century began to develop the more general
modern sense of 'the system of common life' -- society as a thing
in itself. 'Community' reached the same stage of development
in the seventeenth century, and 'State' had reached this stage rather
earlier, having added to its two earlier meanings -- the condition of the
common life, as now in 'state of the nation'; and the signs of a condition
or status, as in 'the King's state' - the sense of the 'apparatus' of the
common life, its framework or set order. Thus we see the terms of
relationship separating out, until 'individual' on the one hand, 'society',
'community', and 'state' on the other, could be conceived as abstractions
and absolutes.
The major tradition of subsequent social thinking
has depended on these descriptions. In England, from Hobbes to the
Utilitarians, a variety of systems share a common starting-point: man as
a bare human being, 'the individual', is the logical starting-point of
psychology, ethics, and politics. It is rare, in this tradition,
to start from the fact that man is born into relationships. The abstraction
of the bare human being, as a separate substance, is ordinarily taken for
granted. In other systems of thinking, the community would be the
axiom, and individual man the derivative. Here individual man is
the axiom, and society the derivative. Hobbes virtually drops all
middle terms between separate individuals and the State, and, seeing the
individuals as naturally selfish, sees society as a rational construction
to restrain the destructive elements in individuals and to enforce co-operation.
Locke sees the rational and co-operative elements as natural, but similarly
postulates separate individuals who create society by consent or contract,
for the protection of their individual interests. The whole Liberal
tradition, following from this, begins with the individual and his rights
and,
judging society as an arrangement to ensure these abstract rights, argues
normally for only the necessary minimum of government. It is clear
that much human good resulted from this emphasis, in the actual liberation
of men from arbitrary and oppressive systems. Yet it rested on descriptions
which, while corresponding to the experience of man breaking out from obsolete
social forms, came to conflict with experience of the difficulties of new
kinds of organization.
While the abstract individual was idealized in this tradition,
an alternative tradition, sharing some but not all of its terms, moved
in the direction of the idealization of society. Rousseau, arguing
that "we begin properly to become men only after we have become citizens",
saw the community as the source of values and hence as "a moral person".
Hegel, beginning from the similar emphasis that man becomes an individual
through society and civilization, saw the State as the organ of the highest
human values -- an embodiment of what Matthew Arnold called "our best self".
Yet both Rousseau and Hegel, with differences of emphasis, saw the importance
of actual communities and forms of association as the necessary mediating
element between individuals and the large Society. It is from this
line of thinking that an important revision of the descriptions has followed.
We preserve, from the early Liberalism, the absolutes of 'individual' and
'society', but we add to these, as mediating terms, 'community'
and 'association', to describe local and face-to-face relationships
through which the great abstractions of Individual and Society operate
in detail. A particular and crucial addition was the concept of 'class',
which is quite different from the static concepts of 'order' and
'rank' because it includes this kind of middle term between 'the
individual' and 'society' -- the individual relates to his society through
his class. Yet 'class' carries an emphasis different from 'community'
or 'association', because it is not a face-to-face grouping but, like 'society'
itself, an abstraction. Marx argued that by their common membership of
a particular class, men will think and act in certain common ways even
though they do not belong to the same actual communities, and that the
processes of 'society' are in fact best understood in terms of the interaction
of these classes. Thus, in the nineteenth century, while the abstract
descriptions of 'individual' and 'society' retained their force, a number
of new descriptions were made and emphasized, their general import being
the indication of particular kinds of relationship. It is on this
whole range -- rising, as we have seen, from a complex of historical changes
and rival intellectual traditions -- that certain twentieth-century disciplines
have acted....
In the long process of actual history, some of these descriptions
have come to seem inadequate, but all, in different degrees, have been
recharged by experience of an important kind which can apparently be interpreted
in only this way. It is very difficult, for example, to live in a
modern industrial society and not feel the force of the 'individual and
society' distinction. There is a deeply-felt discontinuity, for most
of us, between what we as individuals desire to do, and what, by some apparently
mysterious process, actually happens 'out there' in society. This
feeling is perhaps even stronger now than it was when the sharp distinction
was first made. Individuals feel radically insecure when their lives
are changed by forces which they cannot easily see or name, and as societies
have become larger and more complicated, and as the power to change an
environment and real relations within it has greatly multiplied, this insecurity
has certainly increased. Such insecurity is a constant source of
a particular kind of individualism. As Tocqueville noted:
Individualism is a novel expression, to which
a novel idea has given birth, a mature and calm feeling, which disposes
each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellow-creatures
and to draw apart with his family and friends.
It may not always be mature and calm, but it is an obvious enough movement,
especially now in our own society....
...This is not only a crisis of individuals, but also of
a society. The warm house, detached and insulated, where a man can
live as he wishes, and find certain satisfaction with his family and friends,
makes sense, again and again, in an essentially cold and impersonal society.
We can say that the effort will fail, that the insulation will be broken,
but still, to very many, it will seem a good risk, against the apparent
certainty of a harsh and meaningless society. Individualism was a
term of growth, from the rigidity of a society which, while securing, also
restricted and directed men's actual lives. Any growth beyond individualism
is necessarily more than a return to old and discredited interpretations.
The experience we have now to interpret includes both the gains of individualism
and its limits. There is the inescapable fact of mutual dependence,
by which alone, as we live, the house can be supplied. Such a meaning
has grown, in new ways, with the definitions of democracy and community.
But while these direct new energy, the old meanings are continually recharged.
The separation between the individual and society is visibly not breaking
down. In this continuing tension, the meanings that were terms of
growth pass over into meanings that deny growth. Democracy and community
have again and again been made over into the old kind of restriction and
direction. Individualism has passed into selfishness and indifference
by the facts of its own incompleteness. For the turning away
is in fact an attitude towards other individuals, and not only to the 'impersonal'
society. If we stand on our rights as a bare human being we are forced
either to recognize that everybody is in this situation and has these rights,
or, in denying or remaining indifferent to them, to diminish the quality
of our own claim. We can turn other individuals into 'the masses',
from whom we must separate ourselves. We can group other individuals
into particular classes, nations or races, as a way of refusing them individual
recognition. And some men will be satisfied by this while they are
the individuals and others the masses, the excluded group. Yet, inevitably,
by this extending process, we are all converted to masses, for nowhere,
in a world so composed, can our own individuality be fully recognized by
others; they are turning away from us to establish their own. This
is the experience we are now trying to face and interpret, at the limit
of the meanings we know.
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