St Augustine said he knew what time was until someone asked him, and Walter Bagehot said the same about ‘the nation’. This book is for all those who have experienced the same numb helplessness when asked to define such words as alienation, class, dialectic, empirical and so on, down to structural and unconscious.

Not for nothing is it subtitled ‘a vocabulary of culture and society’; its origins lay in a projected appendix, to which the author has been adding ever since, to his own now classic first work. Raymond Williams is neither a philologist nor an antiquary. He explains in his introduction, itself an invaluable piece of intellectual autobiography, that this book is not ‘a neutral review of meanings’ undertaken in order to ‘purify the dialect of the tribe’, but a social history of words whose variations and confusions of meaning reflect real historical changes rather than purely linguistic development. It is therefore emphatically not a didactic primer, but the work of a cultural historian seeking to show how certain words have been and are used, and why.

Nor does the book claim to be a comprehensive impersonal work of reference. In discussing the ideology of the compilers of the great Oxford English Dictionary. Williams points out that the air of massive impersonality it communicates is not so free of social and political opinion as the casual user might think. He is himself aware that his own preferences, like Dr Johnson’s in his Dictionary are bound to show.

This has clear advantages but inevitably leads to some obvious omissions. Thus Romantic is in but Classical (other than as a short subentry under Class) is not, nor is Enlightenment; Capitalism, Socialism and Communism are in, Feudalism and Fascism are not. More surprisingly, there is no entry for Freedom, or for Rights.

The book is laid out alphabetically as a work of reference, but it is also possible to read it through, using the very thorough system of cross-referencing to go, for instance, from Theory to Ideology, to Idealism, to Materialism, etc. In fact it is a testimony to the consistency of Williams’s approach that it appears to be possible to work right through the book in this way, as so many entries are interconnected – not least in having been subjected to the same historical forces and changes.

Many entries are masterpieces of compressed information and analysis. The Socialist entry includes not only a discussion of the origin and first use of the word in modern sense, but also sub-entries for Communist, Anarchist, Nihilist, Populist, Militant and the Left. The entry on Representative is a miniature history of the theory of government, from Charles I’s description of his parliament as ‘the Representative body of the Kingdom’ (he meant symbolising rather than standing for it), via the crucial distinction (Burke’s) between representative and delegate, through to the modern differentiation between representative and participatory democracy.

As might be expected there are particularly valuable entries on literature and the arts: for instance, on the original distinction between artist and artisan (deriving from the exclusion of engravers from the new Royal Academy in the eighteenth century); on the new use of ‘literary’, to mean more than the ability to read, at the time of the growth of independent authorship; and on the difference in the arts between naturalism (portraying surfaces) and realism (understanding processes).

There is also an entry on Science which contains a clarifying discussion of the common tendency to confuse ‘scientific’, meaning ‘a demonstrative proof in an argument’, with the later sense of ‘methodological rigour’; and the Ideology entry is particularly useful in noting, and quoting, the neutral as well as the more usually stressed negative senses in which the word is used by Marx and Lenin. One of the most needed entries is the justifiably long one on Structuralism.

It is characteristic of Williams’s approach that the short entry on Wealth should contain not only mention of Ruskin’s famous coinage ‘Illth’, but a cross reference to an entry on Welfare where a sixteenth-century source is noted for ‘ilfare’. Such personal touches amid so much erudition and authority suggest that this book is the fruit not only of enormous reading and profound thought, but of a certain unity of work and life. Without this it is hard to imagine how so much material could have been either collected or presented in so systematic and yet human a form.

Raymond Williams, Keywords, London: Croom Helm / Fontana, 1976

[ Tribune, 13.2.1976 ]