Volume 11 Number 6
September 17, 2008
Raymond Williams and the Roots of
Critical Cultural Studies in Education:
An Essay Review
Michael W. Apple
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Smith, Dai. (2008). Raymond Williams: A Warrior’s Tale.
Cardigan, Wales: Parthian Books.
Pp. 514
ISBN 978-1-905762-56-9
Citation: Apple, Michael. (2008, September 17).Raymond
Williams and the roots of critical cultural studies in education:
An essay review. Education Review, 11(6). Retrieved [date] from
http://edrev.asu.edu/essays/v11n6index.html
The growth of critical analyses of the relationship between knowledge and power
in education over the last three-four decades has its roots not only in the United States,
with the centuries’ long struggles by oppressed groups to have their cultures, histories,
and knowledge represented in “official knowledge.” It also owes a debt to specific
people outside our borders. This is not an insignificant point. In a time of nativist
impulses and a “go it alone” set of national and international policies, it actually is rather
salutary for educators in the United States to recognize their intellectual debts to the
efforts of people outside our borders.
In critical education, there are clear examples of this in the ways the work of
Paulo Freire is drawn upon—although unfortunately he is often used by the wielders of
Paulo’s name for legitimacy and as a set of political slogans that sometimes masks the
lack of overt organic connections both with the realities of education on the ground and
Education Review Vol. 11 No. 6
2
with the cultural struggles of oppressed people. This issue of political disconnect is
something to which I shall have occasion to mention again later on in this essay.
But there are others besides Freire to
whom critical educators have looked, especially
those for whom the intricate connections
between culture and power are a guiding set of
issues. Among the most significant
scholar/activists in this regard was the British
(actually Welsh) cultural analyst and critic
Raymond Williams. In books such as Culture
and Society (1958), The Long Revolution (1961),
The Country and the City (1973), Keywords
(1976), Marxism and Literature (1977), and
many more, he provided a powerful re-reading
of the historical and contemporary politics of
what he called “the selective tradition.” In the
process, he gave critical work in and on cultural
institutions such as schools, museums, and the
media essential tools to engage in the
uncovering of some the most complex inter-connections among cultural form and
content, differential power and access, and the class realities of our societies. While
Williams’s focus was consistently on class relations, his work had a major impact on
issues surrounding race and gender as well. Indeed, a good deal of what we now call
cultural studies in general can be partly traced to his initial efforts.
To anyone who has read some of my own work, especially the earlier efforts in,
say, Ideology and Curriculum (Apple 1979/2004) and Education and Power (1982/1995),
the influence of Williams is clear. When I first read his work while still a graduate
student in the late 1960s, it was transformative. The Long Revolution in particular had a
profound impact on me and many others. Its analysis of the ways in which the struggles
of “ordinary people” to win schooling that was respectful, to democratize the media, to
redefine literacy and to challenge hegemonic apparatuses in general—all of this provided
a much more subtle and less reductive picture of the nature and power of agency and
cultural and social movements. It also gave many of us reasons for least partial optimism
in a time when particular quasi-Marist understandings told us that cultural struggles
inside and outside of schools were basically epiphenomenal and had little lasting power
and effects. One can trace the more nuanced understandings of social movements, of
“ordinary actors,” of the importance of the ideological and the cultural in the formation of
movements and identities to work by Williams and others during that period of time.
Apple: The Roots of Critical Cultural Studies in Education
3
Understanding this history is significant for a number of reasons. First, there has
been something of a loss of collective memory, even among those of us who call
ourselves “radical, “critical,” and/or “progressive.” The gains that were made in
countering the reductive and essentializing tendencies within critical scholarship in
education are weakening or even being lost, often substituted for by rhetorical slogans
and a supposed return to political and ideological “purity” (or by language systems that
seem –if you will forgive the use of a somewhat masculinist metaphor—needlessly
impenetrable). Second, not only is this a fundamental misreading of, for example, the
Marxist and neo-Marxist traditions (the plural is absolutely essential); but it can too often
lead to the weakest kind of tactical and strategic understanding of what is possible and
necessary in a time of rightist hegemonic power. It misrecognizes the significance of
social and cultural movements and struggles inside and outside of schools and other
similar institutions (Anyon, 2005). Also, the rhetorical call for a “return” to political and
ideological purity is often exactly that—rhetorical. It substitutes a set of slogans for the
difficult task of building what I have elsewhere called a “decentered unity” among
progressive groups, something that is so necessary in a time when the Right has
organized across its differences in ways that demonstrate how cultural, economic, and
political movements and tendencies can compromise and work together (Apple, 2006;
2000).
This is one of the reasons for instance that Nancy Fraser’s efforts to show the
importance of both a politics of redistribution and a politics of recognition—and to try to
ensure that they do not contradict each other--are seen as important (Fraser, 1997).
Though somewhat taxonomic, her analysis does point to a way out of the debate between,
for example, structural and poststructural positions that have become all too common
within the multiple critical traditions in educational theory and politics. And it is one of
the reasons why Wayne Au, Luis Gandin, and I, for example, have tried as hard as we
could to give a more respectful and clearer picture of the range of the
theoretical/methodological/political movements and tendencies within the critical
traditions (and once again the plural is crucial) in our recent volume, Routledge
International Handbook of Critical Education (Apple, Au, and Gandin, 2009).
This need to recognize the contributions of a politics of both redistribution and
recognition—and how both can be employed to understand the growth of rightist policies
and practices in education and the larger society and how these movements can be
interrupted--is something about which I have talked at greater length in Educating the
“Right” Way, and especially in the recent and much enlarged second edition (Apple,
2006). As I have argued, those of us who are within the critical education communities
are not in a church, so we should not be worried about heresy. Given this, one of my
major points again is that there is great risk in forgetting the gains that were made in our
Education Review Vol. 11 No. 6
4
understanding of the inter-relationships among what have been called the economic,
political, and cultural spheres.
Concepts such as “hegemony” and “counter-hegemony,” “relative autonomy,”
“good sense and bad sense,” “identity,” “official knowledge,” “cultural politics,” and
many, many others were developed to be used to solve particular problems in our
attempt to understand what was and was not possible in education and in the larger
society. In essence, they are reflections of the decades-long larger debates over what the
status of culture and consciousness is, over whether educational and cultural struggles
can make a difference in society in lasting and powerful ways, over whether the only
thing educators can do is wait for economic transformations before we can have a real
impact. These concepts have too often now been stripped of their genesis in these larger
debates and at times seem to be employed in relatively sloppy ways. This is a distinct
pity not only because it has a limiting effect on their analytic usefulness, but also because
it makes it even easier for the Right to say that they engage in “neutral” research, while
the left simply confirms its own ideology. The former claim is wildly inaccurate of
course. The latter claim is also certainly overstated in the extreme, but it may need to be
taken a bit more seriously than we are apt to do I fear (Apple, et al. 2003; Apple and
Buras, 2006).
All of what I have just said points to one of the major reasons that I think that
returning to Raymond Williams’s work is more than a little useful. He spent a good deal
of his life trying to answer questions about the relations between culture and economy,
about the lives of “ordinary people” and what counts as high status culture, about how the
distinctions between “worthy” people and “worthy” knowledge solidified class relations,
and how cultural distinctions that (some) people accept as commonsense mask the tense
and antagonistic struggles that organize and disorganize a society. Along with others
such as Pierre Bourdieu (1984), Basil Bernstein (1977), Lucian Goldman (1976), and the
list could go on to include many others, he set the stage for a radical and insightful
interrogation of the form and content of the cultural assemblage of unequal societies like
our own. And he was compelling as a writer in doing this in ways that influenced entire
generations of critical work in education, literature, cultural theory, and many other areas.
Williams was from Wales—a center of working class and socialist political and
cultural activism. His roots in working class life and in the struggles over what Nancy
Fraser (1997) has so nicely called a politics of redistribution and a politics of recognition
that I mentioned earlier are evident in the entire corpus of work that he completed.
Perhaps because I too come from similar roots and from an often impoverished but
deeply political family, this may partly explain why he had such an impact on me. The
fact that I am also from a family of printers and worked my way through night school as
an undergraduate while working as a printer during the day may also provide other
reasons for my very positive reactions to Williams’s writings. Printing was among the
Apple: The Roots of Critical Cultural Studies in Education
5
most radical crafts and was a center of working class radical literacy practices. Thus,
both Williams’s biography and writing made sense to me in particular ways. But this
cannot be a full explanation. Many people all over the world who came from very
different backgrounds found in his writing and in his life compelling critical analyses and
political and cultural strength.
As Dai Smith shows, Raymond Williams was a
“scholarship boy,” ultimately winning entrance to one
of the more elite universities in England where he
studied English literature, became a film critic, and was
active in political mobilizations. Interestingly enough,
much of his career was devoted to adult education,
especially the education of working class men and
women, and he was never totally comfortable with an
“academic life.” This undoubtedly resonated as well
with many critical educators, and critical cultural
scholars in general, who have deeply ambivalent
relations with being at institutions that are filled with
contradictions about whose knowledge is valued, who
is admitted to study it, and how “minorities,” women,
and working class groups have historically been treated
(or often marginalized).
Dai Smith
Although there are a number of critical analyses of Williams’s analytic corpus of
work and of the relationship between his life and this work (see for example, O’Connor,
1989; Dworkin & Roman, 1993; and especially Inglis, 1995. See also, Eagleton, 1976),
Smith’s biography has devoted much more of its attention to the personal. It traces out
Williams’s early family and childhood experiences well. He follows Williams through
elementary and secondary school and then on to university life, where the political and
academic worlds he inhabited had both complementary and contradictory relations to
each other. Smith had access to a large amount of personal and archival material and
unpublished writing that were made accessible to him. This enables him to paint a much
more nuanced picture of Williams as a person and as a writer.
While I found the detailed nature of Smith’s account more than a little useful, the
book may be too detailed for some United States readers who may be less interested in
such biographical information and more concerned with Williams’s specific arguments
about culture and power.
Yet, for me, these details provide a sense of the roots, continuities, and
conceptual/historical/political breaks and contradictions that led to the positions that
made his work so influential. While not everything in an author’s production can be
reduced to the workings out of her or his biography, knowing these details makes an
Education Review Vol. 11 No. 6
6
author’s claims—and why they resonated with so many people—more understandable.
The book’s portrait of the personal, financial, intellectual, and political tensions that
Williams experienced not only humanizes him, but makes him a recognizable figure.
This may not have been Smith’s conscious intention, but he has succeeded in showing
Williams as someone who went through very similar kinds of things as many committed
scholar/activists may be experiencing today when they too try to live their values at the
same time as they deal with family, with institutional and writing demands, with the
depredations of neoliberal and neoconservative attacks on education and on the entire
public sphere, with tensions with friends and colleagues, and with the compelling nature
of political commitments and mobilizations. Williams was not always perfect in this
regard. But though we all try, who is?
The author has made a choice to include significant sections of Williams’s
published and unpublished work. Large chunks of the novels Williams wrote are present,
linked to his background in Wales, to his family history, and to his political and cultural
commitments. The fact that Smith has excerpted from a number of Williams’s
unpublished work—many of his novels never saw the light of day—gives us a glimpse of
the frustrated artist, poet, and screen writer that may not be visible to those of us who
know Raymond Williams only through his powerful critical analyses of cultural politics.
At times, the excerpts seem too much, too long. But by sticking to Williams’s texts and
giving us detailed descriptions and explanations of what may have lay behind them, the
connections between Williams’s biography and history in working class Wales, in school,
in Cambridge, as an adult educator, and in political movements are made considerably
clearer than were visible before.
The book stops mid-point in his career. Thus, crucial volumes such as Marxism
and Literature and the reasons behind their writing are not present. Williams’s more
overtly political and “popular” writings on hope and possibilities that he wrote later in his
career are not included. Yet, Williams was among the very best in pointing out not only
the dangers that we faced (and still face), but also the ways in which we might organize
and act. In books such as The Year 2000 (1983) and Resources of Hope (1989), he
argued against quiescence and cynicism, saw the potential in ecological movements and
in new social movements that were growing in importance throughout the world, and
challenged us to eschew the mantra of T.I.N.A. (“There is no alternative”) in the
environment, in the economy, in the control of culture and the media, and in so much
else. Reading these later books in particular is to encounter once again someone whose
voice was—and remains today—a powerful reminder of how to write as an engaged
scholar.
Raymond Williams: A Warrior’s Tale provides a rich sense of the experiences of
William’s life and environments. It nicely captures his frustrations over novels published
and unpublished and over the task of writing and publishing in general. With these
Apple: The Roots of Critical Cultural Studies in Education
7
strengths, however, there were elements that could have been given greater attention.
The specifics and elegance of Williams’s theoretical and political interventions are
treated, but not in a manner that demonstrates the radical break that he was constantly
moving toward. The works are described; the steady movement away from more
traditional understandings of and grounding in “great literature” are pointed to, as is his
lifelong commitment to the cause of working class literacy and to the uses of literature to
assist “ordinary” men and women in a more profound understanding of their own lives.
(And here, his similarities to Gramsci’s position on the role of “elite knowledge” are
worth more attention; see, for example, my discussion of this in Apple, 1996.) But the
ways in which this began to contribute to a world-wide critical debate over the
relationship among culture, class relations and antagonisms, economic reductionism, and
political/educational possibilities is somewhat muted.
In some ways, saying this may be unfair to Dai Smith. This was not his central
task. What he has given us is a personal life, richly portrayed. But Williams’s
interventions into debates that had been raging for decades made him a commanding
international figure. Reading later works such as Marxism and Literature is to enter into
the contested terrain of the relationship between base and superstructure, how we think
about ideology and hegemony, the role of struggles over culture as transformative social
elements, and much more. It is to enter into a terrain populated not only by Williams but
by such crucial figures as Gramsci, Althusser, and E. P. Thompson. People such as E. P.
Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Stuart Hall, and others are mentioned. Their personal
relations with Raymond Williams are noted and this is indeed interesting. But the
intensity of the analytic and political debates and the relation to their contributions to the
formation of this contested terrain are never developed quite enough.
All of these figures, even when they were not always in agreement on politics and
on how power worked, forced us to take account of complexity, of cultural form and
content, of identity, of lived experience and how it is formed out of the material and
ideological contexts of daily life. All of them were strongly opposed, in their own ways,
to the reductive and essentializing tendencies that have weakened critical traditions in the
past. How Williams began to move toward intervening in these larger debates in his later
life and the impact these interventions so clearly had would have been worth pointing to.
This is of particular importance if Dai Smith continues his efforts and works toward
writing a second volume on Williams’s later life and work, as I very much hope he will.
I am looking forward to that volume—and to what I hope will be a return to some of the
foundational volumes that helped set us on a path that continues to this day by members
of the critical educational studies community who are justifiably concerned with the
complex connections between knowledge and power. Williams can help us think through
our responsibilities as researchers and activists. He remains a truly valuable resource as a
scholar and as a person.
Education Review Vol. 11 No. 6
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References
Anyon, Jean. (2005) Radical Possibilities: Public Policy, Urban education, and a New
Social Movement. New York: Routledge.
Apple, Michael W. (1979/2004) Ideology and Curriculum. New York: Routledge.
Apple, Michael W. (1982/1995) Education and Power. New York: Routledge.
Apple, Michael W. (1996) Cultural Politics and Education. New York: Teachers College
Press.
Apple, Michael W. (2000) Official Knowledge: Democratic Education in a Conservative
Age, 2nd edition. New York: Routledge.
Apple, Michael W., et al. (2003) The State and the Politics of Knowledge. New York:
RoutledgeFalmer.
Apple, Michael W. (2006) Educating the “Right” Way: Markets, Standards, God, and
Inequality, 2nd edition. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Apple, Michael W. & Buras, K. L. (Eds.) (2006) The Subaltern Speak: Curriculum,
Power, and Educational Struggles. New York: Routledge.
Apple, Michael W., Au, W., & Gandin, L. A. (Eds.) (2009) Routledge International
Handbook of Critical Education. New York: Routledge.
Bernstein, Basil. (1977) Class, Codes, and Control, Volume 3, 2nd edition. London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Bourdieu, Pierre. (1984) Distinction: A Social critique of the Judgment of Taste.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Dworkin, Dennis L. & Roman, Leslie G. (Eds.) (19930 Views Beyond the Border
Country: Raymond Williams and Cultural Politics. New York: Routledge.
Eagleton, Terry. (1976) Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory.
London: New Left Books.
Fraser, Nancy. (1997) Justice Interruptus. New York: Routledge.
Goldmann, Lucian. (1976) Cultural Creation in Modern Society. St. Louis, MO: Telos
Press.
Inglis, Fred. (1995) Raymond Williams. New York: Routledge.
O’Connor, Alan. (1989) Raymond Williams: Writing, Culture, Politics. New York:
Blackwell.
Williams, Raymond. (1958) Culture and Society. New York: Harper & Row.
Apple: The Roots of Critical Cultural Studies in Education
9
Williams, Raymond. (1961) The Long Revolution. London: Chatto & Windus.
Williams, Raymond. (1973) The Country and the City. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Williams, Raymond. (1976) Keywords. London: Fontana/Croom Helm.
Williams, Raymond. (1977) Marxism and Literature. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Williams, Raymond. (1983) The Year 2000. New York: Pantheon.
Williams, Raymond. (1989) Resources of Hope. New York: Verso.
About The Reviewer
Michael W. Apple is John Bascom Professor of
Curriculum and Instruction and Educational Policy
Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and
World Scholar and Professor of Educational Policy
Studies at the Institute of Education, University of
London. He has written extensively on the relationship
between knowledge and power in education and on
how we might better understand and interrupt Rightist
policies and practices in education. Among his most
recent books are: Educating the “Right” Way: Markets,
Standards, God, and Inequality, 2nd edition (2006); The
Subaltern Speak: Curriculum, Power, and Educational
Struggles (2006), with Kristen Buras; Democratic Schools: Lessons in Powerful
Education, 2nd edition (2007), with James Beane; and the forthcoming Routledge
International Handbook of Critical Education (2009), with Wayne Au and Luis Armando
Gandin.
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Education Review Vol. 11 No. 6
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Education Review.
Editors
Gene V Glass
Arizona State University
Kate Corby
Michigan State University
Gustavo Fischman
Arizona State University
http://edrev.asu.edu