Raymond Williams on the “Individual", "Society". and “Class”

 The following passages are from Raymond WilliamsThe 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”, partly because he saw himself as an analyst of communication, not just literature. As evidenced in his Keywords (1976), and in the passages below, he was long concerned with the history and nature of the modern conception of humanity and society, and studied it especially through an analysis of changes in the use of words associated with the transition to modernity.  Among anthropologists, only Louis Dumont (Homo Hierarchicus , From Mandeville to Marx, and Essays on Individualism) 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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