The earliest ideas on culture, Mr. Williams claims, developed in opposition to the laissez-faire society of the political economists. As the ideas on culture took shape, on the one hand, they became identified with a 'whole way of life.' On the other hand... culture became a court of appeals where real values could be determined. Culture, thus separated from the whole society, was associated with the idea of perfection through the study of the arts... Mr. Williams contrasts the ideas of ' culture as art' and 'culture as a whole way of life,' and commends the latter... the book should definitely be read by all those interested in English intellectual history.

One of the century's most distinguished public intellectuals, Raymond Williams (1921-1988) helped to create and form the conceptual space of contemporary literary & cultural studies.

Introduction
Part 1: A Nineteenth-Century Tradition
I. Contrasts
i. Edmund Burke and William Cobbett
ii. Robert Southey and Robert Owen
2. The Romantic Artist
3. Mill on Bentham and Coleridge
4. Thomas Carlyle
5. The Industrial Novels: Mary Barton and North and South, Mrs Gaskell; Hard Times, Dickens; Sybil, Disraeli; Alton Locke, Kingsley; Felix Holt, George Eliot
6. J. H. Newman and Matthew Arnold
7. Art and Society
Part II: Interregnum
i. W. H. Mallock
ii. The ' New Aesthetics'
iii. George Gissing
iv. Shaw and Fabianism
v. Critics of the State
vi. T. E. Hulme
Part III: Twentieth-Century Opinions
1. D. H. Lawrence
2. R. H. Tawney
3. T. S. Eliot
4. Two Literary Critics
i. I. A. Richards
ii. F. R. Leavis
5. Marxism and Culture
6. George Orwell