This collection of essays and lectures from the 1980s foregrounds Williams’ concern with elucidating the material, historical and social relationships that shape cultural and other forms of social life, and are given expression in variously specific forms through culture. He takes as his subject of critique the fluidity of the notions of ‘modernism’ (and ‘postmodernism’) and the equally soap-like term ‘avant-garde’, providing a detailed history of twentieth century art and media. These vague subjects are perfect as Williams’ concern is for specificity, dynamism and social context. In equal turns, Williams deals with literature, cinema and attitudes towards technology and social change.

Williams narrows down modernism to its differentiating or fracturing character - a proliferation of groups developing out of one another, each claiming uniqueness - and noting how this anti-bourgeois ‘movement’, if it can be sensibly called that, was perfectly suited to assimilation within the market, because of its structure and its affirmation of subjectivism and formalism. ‘Cinema & Socialism’ explores this character in relation to the radical potential of film and the shifting meaning of naturalism throughout film and theatrical history.

One recurring theme is that of transgressing or crossing boundaries, a ‘mobility across frontiers’, whether across the often unhelpful boundaries of the traditional disciplines that study culture, or the movement of people to developing metropolitan centres in the Western world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Many of the artistic innovators of this period were immigrants, and their subjective experience of strangeness as mysterious and, more importantly, their experience of community as first and foremost based upon their shared choice of medium or practice, shaped the innovations in art that they produced, and its development according to distinct cultural forms.

One is impressed by Williams’ historical empathy: his ability to place himself within a previous set of social relations and circumstances that he is analysing and view them as if he is contemporaneous with them. This is no doubt due to his scholarly command of Western twentieth century history, and firm grasp of the historical imagination. His style ranges from dry-academic to polemical and rousing, but the historicity of his writing gives it a flow throughout. The book’s fluency, however, is at times hampered by its form: many of the sentences are long and clumsy, and this makes an already demanding and challenging piece of cultural-historical theory very hard to stay with at times. For these reasons, this is not a read for the faint-hearted, but it is worth the effort. The book ends with a much more fluent transcription of a conversation between Raymond Williams and Edward Said, which shows linkages in their work and clarifies some of the points made in the earlier part of the book.

Some parts of Williams’ critique are perhaps now outdated, in particular a lament about the growing dependence of cultural organisations and mass media on sponsorship. While in some cases his concerns appear to have been proven, he implies an overly deterministic, Chomskian model of the influence of capital, and does not consider the possibility that private companies may be able to form progressive constellations with cultural producers without restricting the political potential of their work, and even facilitating dynamism and creativity.

Williams’ historical knowledge of literature, cultural studies and the avant-garde is presented with a deftness and expertise which is still unfortunately unusual in the academe. Consistently and methodically, he is able to elucidate the connections between deep ‘structures of feeling’, economic and political processes and the specific formation of artistic trends within literature, the avant-garde art scene, the development of cultural studies and individual consciousness. In his arguments on modernism and the avant-garde Williams regularly refers to the basic outline of the Formalist approach that became fashionable in cultural studies and the study of cultural forms generally in the 1950s and again to some extent in the 1970s. He uses basic Formalism to elucidate an extensive social analysis moving from formal analysis of cultural works, first explicated by the Vitebsk group (Medvedev, Voloshinov and Bakhtin) in the late 1920s. This involves not theory, (which he considers easy in comparison) but analytical work, ‘to see how, in the very detail of composition, a certain social structure, a certain history, discloses itself’ (Williams 2007:185).

Williams’ critique of cultural pessimism (from Culture & Technology, written in 1983) remains relevant given the still current trend to disavow the future and its alternative potential, and to categorise new technologies alternately as both determinants of social change and threats to established artistic, now ‘classicalised’, forms. This essay, alongside others, provides a useful history of the development of mass communications, and how this has influenced forms of popular culture and produced defensive attitudes from established artists and institutions in the twentieth century. Williams makes note of our apparent predilection for drama dealing with fragmentation and loss of identity, and the naturalisation of competitive violence in popular crime, espionage and intrigue novels, movies and TV programmes. This is connected to the modern experience of dislocation and alienation of the late nineteenth century in the burgeoning imperial centres of Berlin, Vienna, Paris, London and New York.

Not only is Politics of Modernism an invaluable resource for students of genealogy, social and historical analysis, 20th century cultural history, and for scholars of all cultural forms, it also serves as a corrective or reminder to smug, self-defined fissiparous radicals (and there are many in academia as well as outside of it), who embody and reinforce the restrictive practices of the old guard they claim to be surpassing, because they unconsciously remain trapped within the same frames of thinking, and equally importantly feeling.