'Tragic Utopianism' and Critique in Raymond Williams

In a 1992 review essay Fredric Jameson noted that one of the peculiarities of the promotion of the cultural studies project was the neglect of Raymond Williams' sociological and political vision and that leading such revisionism was an Australian-based avant-garde. While this trend has perhaps been recently reversed in the work of such authors, there is a longer history within cultural studies of borrowing the shell of Williams' ideas and investing them with a 'new content', often at odds with his own work. This article is a modest extension of my own efforts to rescue the late sociological project in Williams from such tendencies. It also seeks to draw out a broader set of 'utopian' dimensions in Williams' work than is evident in his more explicit discussions of literary utopias or his related prospective analysis in his late work, 'Towards 2000'.