Raymond Williams Reconsidered:

Right-wing populism is undermining Liberal democracies in both the Unted States and Europe. The reactionary politics of this period, moreover, are very much a intertwined with the economic policies of the past thirty years. Systemic changes in employment and wages have generated socio-economic insecurities, while global migration has destabilized traditional conceptions of national identity. Raymond Williams speaks directly to these issues. The themes of capitalism, industrialization, and national identity run throughout his work where he chronicled the processes of deindustrialization and the regional responses to its effects. His approach to cultural analysis emphasized how feeling—the meaning, values, and practices lived and felt by those who are caught up in them—has a structure that pulls together people’s social experiences and articulates them in terms of shared outlooks and expressions that are manifested in “structure(s) of feeling.” From here, he theorized the kinds of “livelihood,” “bonding,” and “the politics of place” that were needed as strategies for cultivating “communities that hold” together in the face of fractious social spheres and the politics of everyday life.

It is helpful, then, to reconsider Williams’s work, and what it has to say about the current moment and how we might address the crisis of democracy that we now confront.

Black Hawk Hancock is a theorist, cultural sociologist, and methodologist. He is best known for his ethnographic monograph American Allegory: Lindy Hop and the Racial Imagination (University of Chicago Press). For the 2025-2026 academic year he is a Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professor at Swansea University.

He is currently writing a book, with Daniel Wiliams, synthesizing the theoretical contributions of Raymond Williams and Ludwig Wittgenstein for a transnational comparison of cultural pluralism between Wales and the United States. He is an Associate Professor at DePaul University and holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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