Raymond Williams and Education by Ian Menter;

Author:Ian Menter;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

5.2 The Role of the Organic Intellectual in Society

Throughout his life, as we have seen, Raymond Williams engaged not only with his students in adult education and in the university but also with a much broader community. In pursuing his particular commitment to ‘public education’ and putting into practice his views that both culture and education are ‘ordinary’, he developed a range of activity, or, as we might put it now, an increasingly public profile. As we saw from the extract from Keywords at the beginning of this chapter, Williams was well aware of some of the difficulties with the word ‘intellectual’, not least in British society. We have already noted how every public activity he undertook had a distinctively educational character. His writing and his engagement in debate with others were always aimed at developing his own and others’ understanding of the subject under discussion. His deep interest in the processes and technologies of communication was undoubtedly at the core of this aim and led him to become an epitome of what Antonio Gramsci called ‘the organic intellectual’.

In his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci uses this term in his analysis of social processes. The editors of the English translation explain it in this way:

Intellectuals in the functional sense fall into two groups. In the first place there are the ‘traditional’ professional intellectuals, literary, scientific and so on, whose position in the interstices of society has a certain inter-class aura about it but derives ultimately from past and present class relations and conceals an attachment to various historical class formations. Secondly, there are the ‘organic’ intellectuals, the thinking and organising element of a particular fundamental social class. These organic intellectuals are distinguished less by their profession, which may be any job characteristic of their class, than by their function in directing the ideas and aspirations of the class to which they organically belong.

(Hoare and Nowell-Smith, 1971:4)

Williams was clearly a member of both these groups. Holding a position as an academic at the University of Cambridge, he was, like F. R. Leavis, a traditional professional intellectual. But because of his clear class consciousness he was also, like Paulo Freire (see Chapter 4), an organic intellectual in attempting to bring about social and political change. Though for Williams there was often a tension between his respective memberships of these two groups, it is apparent that he was most deeply committed, indeed loyal to the second group.5 We may note that even today, although manifestations of social class may have changed, we can still identify these two groups of intellectuals in our midst, including a number of organic intellectuals who do not hold academic posts but use speaking, writing and social media to communicate ideas for social change and betterment. For those working in the academic establishment, the tensions that Williams experienced may now be felt even more keenly perhaps, owing to the deep encroachment of managerialism and performativity within the academy (see 5.4, below).

In spite of his prolific writings in newspapers and journals such

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