The Long Revolution(s) of Modernity

Abstract

Williams’s embrace of his ‘long revolution’ undercuts any easy prospect of ‘narrative closure’ in any study of his work. His remarkable act of completely republishing and reassessing The Long Revolution’s final chapter in Towards 2000, five years before his death, also problematizes any easy periodization of his work into early and ‘mature’ writings. Yet, of course there were shifts and changes in his emancipatory goals as elsewhere in his work.

A very large part of our intellectual life, to say nothing of our social practice, is, however, devoted to criticizing the long revolution, in this or that aspect, by many powerful selective techniques. But as the revolution itself extends, until nobody can escape it, this whole drift seems increasingly irrelevant. In naming the great process of change the long revolution, I am trying to learn assent to it, an adequate assent of mind and spirit. I find increasingly that the values and meanings I need are all in this process of change. If it is pointed out, in traditional terms, that democracy, industry and extended communication are all means rather than ends, I reply that this, precisely, is their revolutionary character. (LR, p. 13)