Volume 22, Number 1 · February 6, 1975
A Nice Place to Visit
By E.P. Thompson
The Country and the City
by Raymond Williams
Oxford University Press, 335 pp., $9.75
The British 'new left' was among the first of this international family. It began in the mid-Fifties as a strongly political movement, taking hostile views of both orthodox social democracy and communism, and since 1960 it has gone through many mutations. The founding influences—such men as Claude Bourdet, Lelio Basso, Wright Mills, Isaac Deutscher, the voices of communist dissent—gave way successively to other influences such as those of Sartre, Marcuse, Fanon, R.D. Laing, to the rediscovery of Lukacs and of Gramsci, and thence to a highly sophisticated European Marxist tradition. But if we are to understand Raymond Williams—and his remarkable and stubborn consistency—we have to return to the early moment.
Review, 4129 words
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