Settling accounts with "culture"

pp. 1-36

in: Paul Jones, Raymond Williams's sociology of culture, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006

Abstract

Williams's "expansive" usage of the category of culture is the achievement for which he is most widely known. Certainly, references to his "definition of culture" are the most common form of citation of his work. The expansion usually attributed to Williams seems quite straightforward: from a narrowly aesthetic confinement to a widened "anthropological" reach, culture as "a whole way of life". One of Williams's most famous phrases from his early work—taken from a 1958 essay of the same name — seems to sum this perspective up: "Culture is Ordinary".¹