Between 1965 and 1985 there was a major transformation of the English intellectual Left, as R. H. Tawney and Archbishop Temple were forgotten, C. A. R. Crosland and Roy Jenkins were edged aside, and a new body of sages has delivered a more uncompromising and more revolutionary message in their place.

Of these sages, Raymond Williams, Eric Hobsbawm, and E. P. Thompson were the most important. All three are or were “tenured radicals,” all three used academic subjects as instruments of persuasion—literature in Williams’s case, history in the other two cases—and all three had a stimulating effect on the English student revolutionaries of the late 1960s and their successors as these came to maturity without the restraint and respectability that the English student revolutionaries of the 1930s had acquired through participation in the “just and unavoidable war against fascism.”

Williams (1921-88) earned his first reputation from the publication of Culture and Society: 1780-1950 in 1958. But it was through the student revolution that he achieved fame, not only in England but also in the United States, where he has had as devoted a following as in England. Indeed, his American followers have been more devoted, since none of them has been as disrespectful as the literary critic Terry Eagleton, his most distinguished follower in England and now his memorialist,¹ who in Criticism and Ideology(1976), along with much praise, made withering criticism of Williams’s “pragmatism,” “muted intellectualism,” and “residual populism,” of his “provincialism,” “humanism,” and “idealism,”