Steven Poole

From Access to Youth

Raymond Williams’s Keywords of 1976, a seminal lexicon of political terms, has been updated for the 21st century — not entirely successfully

issue 12 January 2019

The mid-term elections in the US, when Democrats took over Congress, were hailed as a victory for ‘progressives’, while David Cameron once claimed to be a ‘progressive conservative’. Well, progress towards what exactly? ‘It is certainly significant that nearly all political tendencies now wish to be described as progressive,’ wrote the cultural critic Raymond Williams, ‘but it is more frequently now a persuasive than a descriptive term.’ Quite.

That is taken from the seminal 1976 lexicon of political terms, Keywords:  A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, in which Williams traced the tangled history of words from ‘anarchism’ to ‘welfare’. The present volume was conceived to update his work and, I suppose, render it more ‘relevant’: a fashionable term of philistinism sadly not interrogated here.

It is quite the brutal, not to say vandalistic, tribute. Williams’s name does not appear on the cover, and the editors have simply binned two-thirds of his entries on the grounds that they have now ‘faded into history’.

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