F R Leavis and Raymond Williams - Two Very Different Positions on 'Culture'

As I grew up, I suppose my idea of culture was what socialists disparagingly called 'posh culture', being positively championed and articulated by the famed literary critic F R Leavis in 'The Great Tradition' (1948). Such 'high culture' was embodied in a small number of seminal and critically important literary and artistic works, productions that revealed universal truths and wisdom, and the highest spiritual and moral purposes to be strived for in a society. Leavis was only recorded once at a open lecture at Cambridge University, where he was a don. In this talk, he articulated his elite position that the democratisation of culture was a great declining. This video contains part of the audio of that lecture.

One articulation of an alternative view of culture was given by Raymond Williams, novelist, critic and Cambridge University don in 'Culture and Society 1750-1950'. Coming from a Welsh working class background, Williams widened the idea of what 'culture' could involve to mean 'the whole way of life' of all of the classes in a society, though there was a corrective focus on the culture of the working classes.

Though Leavis's 'The Great Tradition' was still seen as a seminal text for the study of literature, Williams's 'Culture and Society - 1750-1950' (1958) was now also high on the reading lists of Eng. Lit 101. In the left-leaning atmosphere within universities in the 1970s, I moved towards this second view.

Apart from hearing these two positions on culture articulated, I was as much as anything I was just plain curious to hear Leavis speak!

Enjoy!