The Country and the City Today

Benjamin P. Davis: Your new book is about Raymond Williams. Who was Raymond Williams? Why return to him today?

Jedediah Britton-Purdy: Williams was a very important cultural and social theorist and historian. Zadie Smith said that when she was at Cambridge as an undergraduate, he was one of three figures who dominated the field of cultural theory, along with Foucault and Barthes.

Why did his thinking matter?

There are a lot of different ways to answer the question, because he did a lot of different sorts of things and, in some ways, what unified them was a sensibility—a set of organizing concerns—and a person.

He was a pioneering theorist of communication who based his account of mass media on a complex view that, on the one hand, culture is incredibly important because it sets the bounds of how we can imagine ourselves and, therefore, who we can be to one another. Culture is one of the grounds of both possibility and constraint in our collective life. But alongside this methodologically idealist or culturalist kind of view, he put a very strong materialist emphasis on what the technological forms of communication were and, critically, who owned them and to whose purposes they were being deployed.

He tried to understand culture as something that lives in our minds and interactions, that exists in concrete ways, say in communications infrastructure. It was even part of what you might call a social fate, a shared world we’re born into that in some ways sets the horizons of what we can do, be, know. But culture for him was never just a constraint, a limit. It was also a resource for understanding and action, and the second was the way that it most interested him and most mattered to him. One way to put this is to say that he tried to think as both a humanist and a materialist, all with the same set of eyes, in the same voice.

I think what was really important, though, was not that he had this distinctive profile or set of framing interests (though these both matter), but that his concrete works of cultural and social history and observation demonstrated the value of thinking and seeing in both of those ways at the same time.

In a book called The Country and the City,2 he describes the contrast between rural and urban life, and all the things those terms have been taken to mean, as both the product of centuries of capitalist and technological transformation—of the material remaking of landscapes and communities, ways of working, ways of living together—and also as forms of interpretation, or meaning making. In this book, he works to integrate two quite different aspects of human reality: how we’re constrained and driven from place to place by what happens to us and, at the same time, how people try to make some sense of—and take some control of—their shared lives. It’s a beautiful book. And it’s a book that could only be written by someone who believed that it was necessary to think in both of those ways in order to see anything whole.

I think the other way of talking about who Williams was is to evoke the way that he talked when he was asked to explain himself or to identify himself, which was to say that he came from a small, partly agrarian and partly industrial working-class village in Wales, very close to the English border. In the village, his father was a signalman in the local railroad station and a leader of a general strike in 1926, when Williams was five.

As Williams recounts it, he grew up with a very strong sense of the integrity and the egalitarianism of a local culture of working people and small landholders. This was the place that he always presented as his real ethical and cultural home, where he found the ground of his lifelong socialism and his lifelong commitment to a kind of radical democracy.

So he was both a theorist of how to think and what to think about and a practitioner of theoretically informed observation. He was also a person from a particular place who tried to make—who did make—his life a model of what kind of relation to place and to history a person might want to have.

Benjamin: This volume is about rural futures. How does Williams matter especially for thinking about rural futures today?

Jedediah: The argument of The Country and the City is that, although we get into the habit of thinking of these places as a pair of opposites, it is essential to understand how they’re connected, with the aim of overcoming the division. One part of the artificial division is material: the British city and countryside are deeply connected in a single economic system. If you go to the countryside, the people who own it are the same ones who dominate the city: the “great families” who move back and forth with the season or, as transportation gets quicker, work in the city and play on their estates. And the ordinary people in London and Manchester over the centuries are the dispossessed country people who’ve been driven from the land by clearances or just the economy of a landlord-ridden agriculture. This is a very simplifying thumbnail of his argument, but it captures his basic idea: if you want to think about the country and the city, you have to think about them within the bigger political economy.

The other part of the artificial division is imaginative. So much of the literature of both places is a literature of longing. In the countryside, people hunger for the vitality of the great capitals—the personal freedom, the openness to surprise, the newness of everything. And so much of the literature of the countryside is nostalgic: people pine for something that is already gone, usually having recently slipped over the horizon of time—an intact, organic community, familiar and peaceful and good, but somehow also disappearing and probably irrecoverable.

Williams said, in effect: It doesn’t have to be this way. We are right to want all of these things, and we are right to want them all in one place, in one life. But to start pursuing that, we have to think beyond the divisions that we treat as if they were natural.

How would we bring those thoughts to ground here today? The polarization of US politics and culture has a deep urban-rural shape. So does the polarization of economic fate: most rural places have essentially been in recession for decades, and large shares of the country are being depopulated. For one thing, thinking with Williams would mean refusing to accept that this is something we just have to live with. Agricultural work doesn’t have to be bad work, and farm production doesn’t have to become a form of factory production—so rural areas don’t have to be abandoned.

Changing those premises would mean beginning our economic analysis with the starting point that what an economy produces is not just goods and services—to be produced in the most efficient manner possible—but also work, communities, and lives.

It should be possible to start politically effective conversations about rural futures from the premise that we’re going to talk about what kinds of communities, what kinds of work we’re going to set out to have. And that, in turn, would involve trying to integrate values that are experienced as opposed. In the country: hard work, manual competence, and face-to-face community across generations; in the city: freedom to express and explore oneself, an openness to the world’s variety, contact with what is new and unexpected.

Even when I put it this way, I hope it’s clear that this way of sorting values is simplifying to the point of being just false. But the point is it’s a falsehood we live within, and many people speaking for one set of our polarized values will speak and feel as if “their” values are really absent from the “other side’s” communities and experience. And, instead of asking how we can live out these values in real communities, we effectively believe we have no choice but to live in the landscapes that our political economy produces.

Of course, a different approach to city and the country would need a completely different relationship between our politics and our economy. Our politics would have to be a conduit between our values and culture (our sense of how it would be good to live together) and our economy (the concrete, material driver of how we actually live together). That alternative relationship is one way of naming what Williams meant by socialism, which, in the British setting, with its substantial and self-identified socialist tradition, was how he always identified his politics. We could also call it real democracy—democracy about how we are actually going to live together. There’s a good case to be made that American politics has always been in large part about these sorts of competing visions of political economy and of community, even as these themes have often been displaced or obscured.

So how does Williams’s thinking bear on rural futures? It means thinking of the country as part of the larger set of ways that we are always making our world—a matter of contrasts but also of continuities, of parts and whole processes. It also means trying to become more self-aware and intentional about how we will make these parts of our world, as parts of the ultimate question—which is so often displaced or obscured, but is what ultimately matters to nearly anyone—of how we will live together. Rural futures is a topic, but for Williams the country and the city also formed a topic that opened up a whole way of thinking.

Benjamin: One of the lines you go back to in the book has to do with seeing in landscape, that a landscape is a certain way of seeing. Can you explain that for our readers?

Jedediah: Yeah. As you remind us, he said that a landscape is not a thing but a way of seeing. He meant a way of organizing the significance of what you see, of drawing meaning out of it, or lending meaning to it. He described the frequently painted image of rural England, especially the image with the great house somewhere at the edge, as taking place through the landlord’s eye—the land as seen by those who own it.

He talked about different ways of seeing community, how for novelists of a certain generation and kind, like Jane Austen, the only social characters—in a sense, the only human beings—are the occupants of those large houses. They are each other’s neighbors, and no one in-between registers socially.

And he talked about how we can see landscapes as a repository of history that you can look across. He described walking to a peak above the village where he grew up and looking down over the railroads in the fields and thinking about how the labor of his own people, generations of agricultural laborers, had gone into the making of that place. The landscape so viewed was for him a reminder, maybe even a ratification, of the identity he found in that place.

A landscape for him ceased to be just a thing or a place and became a palimpsest of meanings that could be examined and picked apart and criticized.

So you could ask: Am I looking at this great house through a landlord’s eye? Is this a kind of alien formation in me—that I’ve learned to see in a way that makes invisible the brutality and exploitation of labor that went into making that place?

He described those houses as barbaric in their disproportion to human need and in the disproportion between the labor that goes into them and the handful of people who can actually benefit from them.

In that way, he was interested also in practicing a politics of vision in which he tried to train people in other ways of seeing, ways of seeing a landscape that could be more incipiently egalitarian in what they drew out and valued, and in what they lit on and criticized.

An important thing, and I think a very moving thing in Williams’s work, is that it’s not just those who have the landscapes—the paintings hung up in their great houses—who see landscapes in this culturally inflected, palimpsestic way. Everyone does that. And so, in that sense, the way he talked about landscapes was an example of a phrase that became a kind of slogan for him: culture is ordinary. Everyone in every community, every family, every language and tradition, is involved in making meaning out of what we do—in our relationships and our activity—all the time.

What he said about seeing landscape was an instance of that larger premise about how to approach people, which was to understand that the making of meaning is as essential as the making of things. It is one of our quintessential, almost metabolic activities. We make things, we change the world physically by making things. That makes us who we are. That was the sense in which he was a materialist. But we also, incorrigibly, as part of what it is for us to live, make meaning from what happens to us and from what we do, and the meanings we make become part of the predicates of what we then go on to do.

Benjamin: Was The Country and the City the first Williams book you read?

Jedediah: Yeah. I think I read it in college, and I can’t even remember why. It wasn’t for a course. It may have been because a teacher recommended it to me, or it may have been that I stumbled across it. It was the kind of book that I would have stumbled across.

I read a lot of Wendell Berry from the time I was in high school. And I would have recognized Williams’s book as in the same thematic space. I was being shaped by an interest in agrarian thought, which would lead me to Williams.

And I remember, even the first time I read it (when I think I read it pretty naively), having a sense at points—confirmed in the underlining and the marginalia in that edition—that the book is really something special. That it is remarkable that someone is saying this. It is not just another book. It is a singular book, and I think I got that about it. It’s hard to miss.

Benjamin: For me, when I first read The Country and the City—I’m from a little town in Minnesota—I couldn’t read past the first few chapters. He describes in the first chapter, for instance, having to frequently move for school or for employment. It was jarring enough that I thought: okay, if I read this whole book, it will shift too much in me. So I wasn’t able to go back to it right away. Was there something that really resonated with you in, in college or—

Jedediah: What did you think it would shift in you?

Benjamin: I thought it was…almost too spot-on in naming the way knowledge is discussed as an urban practice between city and city.

Jedediah: The “qualifying paradigms” of the university?3

Benjamin: Yes.

Jedediah: “Qualifying” is such a great word there. The paradigms for evaluation, the paradigms that condition things.

That book didn’t—I hope this is not entirely the wrong word—didn’t scare me or unsettle me in quite that way at that time. But there must have been something in Williams that touched me somewhere. As I started reading him again, I started reading him obsessively, spontaneously and obsessively, with no reason.

About five years ago, my mother had a health scare for a few weeks—we thought maybe she was going to die, and then she was fine, basically. But during those few weeks, I picked up Border Country, which is the novel about his going to his home village to watch his father die. I don’t remember how I knew that was the premise. I’d never read his fiction. I’d only read the two very famous books, The Country and the City and Culture and Society.4 It absolutely gripped me. And then I just kept reading him, and particularly after our second child was born, now three-and-a-half years ago. I just read him. I just read Williams for a year.

I did it without any design on it. I mean, that’s almost right. I said “without any design,” but I had an excuse. This is not interesting, but the book editor of The Nation had asked me back in 2020: Do you want to write on Williams for his centenary in 2021? And I thought that seemed nice and said that I would try. And I think three years later, I had a piece. I ended up publishing it in Dissent. So there was this conceit that I was doing a project, but I was really just reading Raymond Williams.

Benjamin: Williams did a lot of interviews, many of which we now have in Politics and Letters.5 Why do you think the interview mattered to him as a form?

Jedediah: You may know more than I do about this question. I know an important interview with Terry Eagleton after they had a contretemps, and then there’s some early stuff where he and Richard Hoggart are talking to the New Left Review (NLR) editors. And then there’s Politics and Letters, which is, as you know, really one sustained session that the NLR’s editors and he decided to have.

Williams was part of the first generation that had been succeeded at NLR. His generation, and he himself, had come under withering criticism from Perry Anderson (who attacked the generation but not Williams) and Terry Eagleton (who called Williams a parochial and nostalgic thinker). But there were people there who were deeply loyal to him, like Robin Blackburn and Francis Mulhern. And I don’t know quite what the sense of it was, whether they convinced Anderson that they owed it to him to have it out or whether they just wanted to give him a chance to say his piece. But the conversation became something . . . extraordinary.

I mean, that work is an account of his body of thought and its integrity and its relation to his life. For anyone who writes, it’s like a dream: having your years of work made intelligible, with you there to channel it. And he generated most of it himself in those conversations.

So, I wonder whether it’s not that he was extraordinary in speech, that he spoke a kind of prose that is not always equaled in his writing, which is uneven in power and concision. And his prose does suffer, to my mind, at times from a kind of vagueness and abstraction that the conversation did not.

A person who writes can recognize the way that abstractions sort of lead him on sometimes in the writing, and he doesn’t really check himself. Somehow, the speech was more disciplined. So maybe it was that he had a genius for a very serious kind of conversation—and that got memorialized in some interviews.

I wonder about Politics and Letters. It’s become such an important reference point for making sense of Williams because it has this astonishing synoptic quality, and it is in his voice. But I also feel that in that conversation with the then-editors of The New Left Review, I feel palpitating in it this very intense concern not to disappoint them too much or to be too much at deviance with them, even as they are asking him whether his work is not really in some ways sentimental and “small-c” conservative and, maybe, to use a slightly anachronistic term, communitarian. The questions put a lot of pressure on his identification as a person of the Left and, specifically, of the materialist Left.

He speaks beautifully, but he responds to the pressure in a way that is, to my mind, strikingly conciliatory. Many people who read him concluded that his instincts were more small-c conservative than he would have been comfortable saying—because of where he thought of himself as being in British politics, and because conservatism was the position of the right. I think that kind of question about who he was to himself and what he manifested, so to speak, in the writing was at a particularly acute pitch in those conversations.

Benjamin: I was thinking of a concept from your earlier book, This Land Is Our Land, that of “deep reciprocity.”6 I’d be interested to know if you see this importance of reciprocity in his intellectual practice?

Jedediah: There was a standard, very academic kind of complaint about Williams, which was that he didn’t read a lot of his contemporaries and he didn’t cite his contemporaries. People get worked up about that. Some critics said there was something almost autarkic in aspects of his intellectual life. He worked from his own thinking and his own reading, to a very unusual degree. So there’s a way reciprocity would not be the first thing you would think of.

But there’s a tremendous generosity. There’s a tremendous charity and profound interest in the human motivations and appetites, and even the existential struggles, that informed the thought of people that he deeply disagrees with. He deeply disagrees with George Orwell in important ways at a time when much of the Left in Britain just despised Orwell—the harder Left still would. But he writes beautifully about Orwell’s dilemmas and perplexities.

Culture and Society is very substantially a study of conservative thought. He would later say in those interviews with The New Left Review—and there was something to this—that he was driven to conservative thought because nothing else was alive in the English cultural landscape. And so that was the fight he had to have. But it wasn’t just a fight. He paid the deepest kind of intellectual and human attention to those figures—Edmund Burke, Carlyle.

I would emphasize that it’s both, actually. He manages to be interested in the person without somehow reducing the ideas to mere circumstance or to mere positionality. And it’s beautifully done.

People say he had an ability to embody his belief in the importance of the person in front of him. Not always, of course—there are always people who are offended that an important person doesn’t give them enough time. But there are great stories, like one I recount in the book, of Williams running into his office in Cambridge, his books under his arm, and there’s a car waiting outside, and there’s a call from the dean, and there’s also this person who’s going to be an undergraduate who’s come in from some village because he wants to see if Williams will be his tutor. And Williams just stops everything and sits down and gets out his notebook and says, okay, well, tell me what you want to read and let’s set up a schedule of meetings and let me suggest that you look at the following things and when should we meet again? And then he grabs his mail and drops his books and runs out to the car.

That was real. And, I think for him, on his own account, that was rooted in the village in two ways. He talks about the world of his village as one in which no one was ever called “sir” or would call someone else “sir.” And he says he is still unsettled later in life when he encounters that way of address. For him, there was an implicit reciprocity and economy of dignity in the village.

He carried that forward, not merely organically, spontaneously, but quite deliberately, as a program for his own conduct. I think he carried it forward in the way that you do if you believe that the “nowhere” that you came from is actually a humanly better place than the very important “somewhere” that you’ve come to. And you’re going to demonstrate that, right now, in the way that you’re treating the person in front of you. So, I think in that way, a kind of ethics of reciprocity was part of how he thought society should be organized and assessed, and it was also a kind of self-assertion, a very intense self-assertion against the place.

Benjamin: Against the “somewhere”?

Jedediah: The somewhere, yeah—on behalf of the nowhere, which was more of a somewhere for him than the so-called somewhere was.

Benjamin: Right. You also emphasize how power is ordinary for Williams. It is tied to language, like in the use of “sir,” but also that we don’t just learn power from rulers or governments. It’s from teachers. It’s from parents. It’s from our friends. Can you say more for us about power in Williams’s thought?

Jedediah: He has this phrase that sounds very abstract: “Encountering hegemony in the fibers of your own being.”7 And then he has a passage in a book called Second Generation, which is a sequel—but only very loosely a sequel—to Border Country. And in that book, a factory worker who is a union leader—but the union is on the back foot and his life is on the back foot—is in a meeting with a manager over the prospect of a strike and the threat of layoffs. And Williams describes how the worker, as a union leader, has a union behind him. He knows more about how the factory works than the manager. He recognizes the probable mediocrity of the person in front of him. But he also feels welling up in him this deep and terrible suspicion that starts in the body before it hits the mind that this person in front of him is probably the voice of reality and authority, and that nothing he’s going to say is going to count.

Williams was very interested in the origin of that kind of ground intuition about who you are and who other people are and what you can ask of them and what you can insist that they take account of. He was very interested in the small ways that a village life—though he did not idealize village life—taught distance from other people as a way of asserting one’s own worth in what he would have seen as a false, but very powerful, system of value.

I talk in the book about a scene in Border Country where the young stand-in for Williams has lost a pound note. The family can’t afford to lose the money, and his mother immediately thinks that it must have been stolen by the son of a family that’s no good, and she says, “You know how that family is.”

It’s really a key moment.

This is a society divided into good and bad people, and the bad people are poor, and we’re going to name our distance from them.

I think this struck me because I grew up in rural West Virginia. My home county was almost all white. To an outsider, it would be almost all lower-middle class to poor. But from inside, the stratification people experienced was very intense. People were very committed to it, and they would really hurt other people over it.

At that moment in the novel, in reply to the drawing of those kinds of lines, the Williams stand-in’s father says, “I know they are poor. As are we poor.” The statement restitches the social fabric, restitches the sentiment with which the Williamses and this other family are going to regard each other.

It was those kinds of operations of power that could then ramify very, very broadly.

Benjamin: Williams never saw the internet. He was a person of print culture. Do you think this mattered to his writing or his cultural theory? He took technological changes extremely seriously, as you noted earlier.

Jedediah: He did. And he was a person of print culture, but more than most people of his milieu—more than almost anyone else writing about the kinds of things he wrote about at the time—he took television very seriously. They say the TV was usually on at his house, and he wrote television criticism and tried to understand the narratives on TV as instances of the kind of cultural power that we were just talking about.

So, in that sense, he was an early practitioner of a sort of cultural theory that later became widespread. I think it was obvious to him that the stories that people are shown matter and get into our nerves, and that we have to learn how to watch them and what to do with them.

But it does seem important that he never saw the internet. He hoped that a society of greater reciprocity could find its technological means in part through a more decentralized kind of communication. He was interested early on, when it wasn’t yet at all clear where all of this was going, in computer technology as a way that communication could be decentralized, that decisions could be decentralized.

I think he would have been initially susceptible to the idea that the internet was going to be the means to a more participatory and democratic society. He often seems to me, in his late political writings and in his writings about communication, to have been waiting for something like the internet. He says at some point that the shortwave radio might be a key technology for building a socialist society because it’s decentralized, not one broadcast center but many nodes.

But I’ve come to think two things. One thing is within Williams’s thought and one is outside Williams.

From within Williams’s thinking: he would never have made the mistake of imagining that it didn’t matter who owned the internet or internet platforms—or that it could somehow be a matter of social indifference that they were being used for profit. He would have been keenly alert to the kinds of social decisions that were being made when it was decided in the aughts that the internet was going to be basically a regulation-free space, that a literal marketplace of ideas and images was going to do the work of the metaphoric marketplace of ideas. He had every reason not to be tricked by that.

A lot of people were tricked.

But from outside Williams’s thought: for someone who was interested in politics, he was not as deep on politics in some ways, as acute in some ways, as he was on some other topics. And if I can use a metaphor that may sound weirdly theological, I don’t think he had much felt sense of political sin—much sense that a politics in which ordinary people were actually getting to say their piece could be expected to go very far wrong.

I think, when he thought about politics, he was a little bit of a romantic democrat in confrontation with the kinds of questions that our internet culture seems to throw up about how we treat one another, what we make of one another, what versions of ourselves we become. These decentralized spaces are not exactly spaces of deep reciprocity.

His whole disposition to politics would have ill-prepared him to anticipate what the internet did with political culture, what political culture did with the internet. On reflection, as we talk about it—and this is something I did not say in the book—what he would have said about what profit-driven internet culture became would have been very interesting. He would not have missed it or looked away from it. He might have had more to say about it than most people who write about it.

Benjamin: You mention his investment in a socialist politics. I’m thinking of this line from an interview in Politics and Letters where he talks about why there isn’t socialism. He says:

And then he says a few lines later, “It is only when people get to the point of seeing that the price of the contradictions is yet more intolerable than the price of ending them that they acquire the nerve to go all the way through to a consistent socialist politics.”9

I’m thinking of this sense of the compromises, the settlements, the ways we might accept that: the internet is free, the app is free—who cares what it is doing to my brain? What do you make of these compromises he’s worried about versus the fortitude or the courage of seeing it through?

Jedediah: To parse that passage, you’d have to know what he meant by seeing it through. He says in a couple of late essays something like this about socialism: We don’t know how to do this. We know what the market does to people, and we know what statist planning does to people. And he says: I can’t embrace either of these. So all we can do is try to build the practices of greater self-determination and mutuality that could point the way to a different manner of organizing ourselves.

That’s a way of describing a view of how much light there is, how far you can see.

He says, in effect, we can’t see very far. And I think it’s hard to say, “We can’t see very far,” and then to say, “I’m going to see it all the way through,” because you actually don’t know where you’re going. So, I am tempted to say that there’s something in that passage that you read that’s really beautifully and poignantly incisive about Williams, and it’s something I recognize in myself as well.

I mean, you want the world to work. You want people to be, in potential and in practice, decent to one another. You want to act in good faith with others in institutions that support good faith. Surely that wish is both utopian and conciliatory, and Williams was very interested in how people could be caught in that kind of dilemma. He saw it in others and, there, he saw it in himself.

But then, the last thing about resolving the contradictions—honestly, it feels to me like he works himself up to that point because he’s looking at Perry Anderson as he’s talking. I say that because I think that elsewhere, at the same time, he says with a lot of honesty: I don’t know what this would mean.

Benjamin: Revolution is an important concept for him—obviously, given The Long Revolution. Your reading of Williams is that revolution means closing the gap between what people desire and what the world offers them. This is not the first definition I would list under revolution. Can you explain your reading for us?

Jedediah: Although Williams says in a number of places the kind of thing that he says in the interview that you quoted a minute ago, he also says that, as a political matter, he takes revolution to mean different things in different settings. And he often says: I can’t call myself a pacifist in my assessment of the revolutionary movements of the postcolonial countries—and not only the anti-colonial movements, but subsequent kinds of revolutionary moments as well.

He also says: About my own society, I no longer believe that ordinary parliamentary democracy is just going to bring about socialism by electing Labour. But I also think, in some deep way, that when I talk about a rupture, I’m talking about a democratic rupture that can abide with the liberal principles of speech and participation and thought and majority rule on terms of political equality.

He is very much against the idea that revolution should be imagined as coming down to violence. So, in that sense, revolution is not one form of political action, for him, or one form in the transition of power.

As far as he had a settled position, it was for a politics that eschewed violence and appealed to majorities in an open, rational, and democratic way. So, a revolution, for him, is not a tactic or an event. It has to be about what the change is for. Not how you get the change, but the depth of the change.

He believed that radical political goals weren’t deduced from first principles or handed down by a theorist sage, but that the ordinary activity of culture actually embodies what the striving is after. And what do we strive after? According to Williams, it is to be as fully as possible, and as unapologetically as possible, and as generously as possible, a self among other selves. This deep reciprocity was the point of political transformation, its ultimate source, and also its compass. And the basic fact about human beings, he believed, was that we wanted this condition and lived well to the extent that we had it.

That transformation in the human estate was the measure of what he called revolution. So that’s why I came, in the end, to that pretty unconventional definition.

Benjamin: In these past several answers, you mentioned self-determination and its relationship to some independence movements. In studying some of Williams’s reception, it has struck me how influential he was to Stuart Hall and Edward Said. What do you make of this influence?

Jedediah: I think Williams offered himself, not necessarily personally but almost structurally, as a point of identification for someone coming from the margins to the center but wanting to retain a profound loyalty to the margins, partly as a stay against being absorbed too completely by the center.

The persona and the biography themselves are inseparable from an intellectual charisma. A lot of working-class academics—to the extent that there were a lot of working-class academics of his generation and thereafter—had some of that experience of him as well.

If you wanted in the seventies to take culture very seriously, and to think of yourself as a radical critic of things as they were, Williams gave you a very powerful instance of what that might look like: the habits of cultural studies and the way of being intensely concerned with identity and narrative and imagination, while also, in some deep, concurrent sense, thinking of yourself as materialist and radical.

It can be hard to reach back to a sense of how much less ordinary that kind of formation was before Williams embodied it, and that was a kind of handhold for Hall and Said and so many others. Williams was distinctive, even nearly unique in the landscape.

He was also this person who—though he didn’t come from a colony or from a place that was exactly, in recent terms, the object of empire—came from a periphery. And he came from a linguistic periphery in a way—he didn’t speak Welsh, but the Welsh language helped to make the country a place apart in a potentially radical contrast to the center. Or so he sometimes thought.

Benjamin: Said has a sense of exile. Ultimately, he prescribes at least intellectual exile. I was surprised in reading your book to find that Williams also had a sense of exile, but a different one. Can you tell us about that? What did exile look like for Williams?

Jedediah: For Williams, exile was first of all a way of living within one’s own society, and it was regrettable. The ideal for him was to live among others with whom one could be in a strong form of commonality. Exile to him, as he writes about it in Culture and Society and The Long Revolution, as well as in his treatment of Orwell, was a tragic product of commitment to principles that had no present realization in the social world that’s available to you.

Williams saw exile as a kind of impoverishment of experience. It was a product of political and ethical duty in certain circumstances, a way of being true to oneself, but a way of being true to oneself that was regrettable. His intuition was that it lessened you. That it made you lonely. That it acknowledged a limitation in the capacity to act together and to be together.

He never, to my knowledge, called himself an exile, and I wonder whether on some level he didn’t resist the growing sense that he might be in that position, as history went on around him and as there came to be less and less sense that the kind of politics he had grown up in and identified with actually continued to exist. He said: if you’re among Welsh socialists from mining country for a weekend, you wonder, how is it possible that socialism has not come to Britain? But that world was receding, leaving him more of an isolate.

That was a whole world in which socialism seemed to be the obvious direction of a decent society. As that fell away, as these whole worlds fell away, the worlds that had played such a key role of joinery in the different parts of his work and identity, I wonder whether he didn’t feel himself in exile. But it was never a stance that he would have affirmed.

I think he thought that exile brought with it dangers of pride—a severity, a feeling of apartness, a kind of presumptuousness. He thought that in that condition you were less, rather than more, able to act and to do and to be creative.

I’m trying to come to what would really have been the tragedy. If we take seriously the idea that the goal in social life is for people to approach one another as full human beings in all dimensions of their social activity, then the exile, by definition, can’t do that because the exile’s key commitments are denied life in his society.

Again, it’s not the exile’s fault, but it’s his condition. And what a thing for Williams, having spent his whole life laboring to maintain the integrity and the vitality of this very difficult set of historical, geographic, linguistic, and methodological connections—because they came together in the embodiment of one kind of possibility—to realize that you could then be left alone in that.

Benjamin: Williams said to be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.10 And about possibility, he said that it’s not just what’s in the cards: “Possibility, seriously considered, is different. It is not what with luck might happen.”11 So he has this sense of hope, which is, at least in my circles right now, not a fashionable thing to appeal to.

Jedediah: Williams had a sense of loyalty to the people who wanted what his father had wanted, which he believed was the best of human possibility glimpsed—only glimpsed, to be sure!—in the practices of his village and his class and his place. He thought that, if people were being told that those resources of radicalism should be discounted, they were, in some way, being lied to or were being shown things in too simple a way.

What I’m trying to say is that I don’t know whether Williams ever worked out the relationship between the vocation of the critical intellectual and the ethical vocation of a radical egalitarian democrat who was loyal to the people in his cohort. And if you can’t succeed at that, then you’re in the position of exile. And for him, that would have been a human defeat in his own life, in his own sense of vocation.

Benjamin: So, finally, where would you point our readers who haven’t read Williams, if they wanted to begin?

Jedediah: The readers of this volume should read The Country and the City. Everyone should read The Country and the City. It is such a splendid book.

I spent, by pure chance, this morning making an unsatisfactory sketch of how you would try to think about the themes of that book in the American setting, informed by Williams’s way of thinking. And, if nothing else, it confirmed for me that Williams’s way of thinking is absolutely right: that we should think about a countryside as made by how people are swept across the land, by forces beyond their control, by employment and unemployment; by how the land is made by the technologies that transform it and rip things out of it and put things into it, how it’s made by the actions of states writing their writ on it, and how it’s also made through all the ways that people identify with it, all the hopes they imbue it with; and also to realize the ways that all of those hopes and identifications are at least partly tragic.

The thesis of The Country and the City is that we think of the country and the city as such separate places in part because we live in a world that separates us from one another and separates parts of our lives and parts of our capacities from one another. And it’s true that the city has these qualities of freedom and spontaneity and individuality and the country has these qualities of community and the nearness of living things and of work. But we only feel them to be so intensely apart because we are not ourselves able to have them all in one place—so we think they must be located in these two places that can never be brought together. We tend to regard country and city as almost archetypally in contrast, as representing different fragments of a whole of human possibility and human desire. Williams’s point is that all of this has been done to us.

For him, the task of politics is to bring country and city closer together, because country and city are two parts of our actual social and material metabolism, and it’s better for us not to be at odds or too remote. We have to think of the relation between country and city as it now is, partly as a starting point for undoing that division.