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RICHARD CHASE
than exists. But he finds in the working-class the indispensable vir–
tues of "solidarity," "participation," and "community," and it is
here that he is farthest from the current mood of American intel–
lectuals. He has some excellent pages on the damage to the human
good that the concept of the "masses" and such other "dominative"
concepts as "mass culture" and "mass communication" have done.
As for the future, he appears to believe that there is no point in
predicting what society will become-whether, for example, it
will
be socialist, according to any of the traditional definitions. But he
believes that industrialism and democracy by nature create an ever
more classless society in which, if things turn out as he hopes, there
will be for the first time a genuine community of life, containing
within it a wide diversification.
Mr. Williams' Conclusion is somewhat abstract and occasion–
ally vague. His terminology, for better or for worse, is often quasi–
religious (for example, the fundamental necessary equality is for
him,
so far as he states his case, not political; it is "equality of
being"). But only people who habitually pretend "to know" will
chide him for being abstract about so difficult a matter.
As
he
rightly says, culture is a process and we can never fully articulate
what it is while we are in it. In effect Mr. Williams ends where he
began-with the idea, made newly significant, of culture as the
tending of growth, and that is what it should mean for us too, how–
ever different American problems may be from English.
To make a survey of American ideas about culture, on the
model of Mr. Williams' book, would be a difficult but rewarding
task. It would show that except in certain intellectual backwaters,
such as Southern conservatism and New England gentility, culture
in the past always meant to Americans a way of life and a set of
attitudes that change and develop. It would show that this is the
first time in our history when virtually everyone has come to use
the word "culture" as a rationalization of that which does not lead
to change, as a description of the mold a people believes itself to
have settled into, and as a consolatory label for a state of paralysis.
Richard Chase
