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Lucien Goldmann, a thinker trained in this major continental tradition, born in Bucharest and moving to Vienna, to Geneva, to Brussels, to Paris, had at once this separated mobility and this impersonality: very clearly in the style of his work. But it was then interesting to me, having read his work presented in those familiar ways, to hear the voice of a different mind: mobility in that other sense—the quick emotional flexibility, the varying stares at his audience, the pacing up and down of this smiling man in his open-necked shirt, more concerned with a cigarette than with notes but concerned above all with the challenge of his argument, a challenge that evidently included himself. There was a sense of paradox: of amused but absolute seriousness, of provisional but passionate conviction; a kind of self-deprecating and self-asserting boldness. Perhaps the paradox was Goldmann in Cambridge, but it may be more.

For I think we cannot doubt that in sociology and in literary studies we are living through a paradox, and this presents itself to us in many different ways but most evidently as a problem of style. The basic form of the paradox is this: that we need theory, but that certain limits of existence and consciousness prevent us from getting it, or at least making certain of it; and yet the need for theory keeps pressing on our minds and half-persuading us to accept kinds of pseudo-theory which as a matter of fact not only fail to satisfy us but often encourage us to go on looking in the wrong place and in the wrong way. An idea of theory suggests laws and methods, indeed a methodology. But the most available concept of laws, and from it the most available organized methods, come in fact, as Goldmann reminded us, from studies that are wholly different in kind: from the physical sciences, where the matter to be studied can be held to be objective, where value-free observations can then be held to be possible, as a foundation for disinterested research, and so where the practice of hard, rigorous, factual disciplines can seem—indeed can impressively be—feasible.

And then I think it is clear that the existence, in works of literature, of material so laden with values that if we do not deal directly with them we have literally nothing to deal with, leads to an obvious crisis in the whole context of a university which defines itself, more and more, in terms of rigorous, specialist, disinterested disciplines. It is hardly surprising that in England it has been literary critics, and above all Leavis, who have led the opposition to what Goldmann calls ‘scientism’. The record in sociology has been less clear and, I would say, less honourable. For of course it is possible in social studies, by acts of delimitation, isolation, definition, to produce or project certain kinds of objective material which can be held to be value-free because none of the connections to the rest of experience or to other kinds of relationship are made. Even values themselves can be studied in this way, as in a more or less sophisticated opinion polling: that while a percentage believes this another percentage believes that, and this result, until the next time, is the end of the research. And I wouldn’t want to say that the results of these kinds of work mightn’t contribute, very valuably, to the central business of social studies, which because they must deal with men in social relationships and in history must, whether they know it or not, deal with active values and with choices, including the values and choices of the observers. All am saying is that in the end it is this centre that is absent, or is insufficiently present; and that from this very default, compounded by the historical failure to develop British social studies in any adequate way (and we remember the difficulty of getting them established in Cambridge at all), the claim began to be made that in literature, in English, where values and their discussion were explicit, a real centre, a humane centre, might be found.

But this is where the central problem of the relation between literature and social studies at once arises. We must not think, by the way, that in literary as in social studies the pursuit of the falsely objective wasn’t undertaken. The classical languages, and by a hasty derivation their literatures, could be studied by a rigorous internal textual methodology, which has had its effect on nearly all literary studies. The study of other languages in the same spirit, by isolated set texts and the like, has similarly been inserted into the process of literary study, often explicitly as a way of providing at least some rigorous discipline. In our own studies of the very rich and important English medieval literature, such internal methodologies, and a relative isolation from active questions of value and of history, have made considerable headway. Everything is again justifiable, in its own immediate terms; it is the connection of those terms to the central inquiry that has become problematic or, more graciously, ultimate.

The outstanding difference between physical and humane studies is not only a matter of inevitable questions of expressed and active values. It is also a matter of the nature of change: that societies and literatures have active and conflicting human histories, which are always inseparable from active values. But in literary as in some social, historical and anthropological studies these facts of change can be projected into an apparent totality which has the advantage of containing them and thus of making them at last, like the rocks, stand still. Except, of course, that in the actual physical sciences we soon learn, even against everyday experience, that only some rocks stand still, and that even these are the products of change: the continuing history of the earth. It is not really from science, but from certain philosophical and ideological systems, and I suppose ultimately from religions, that these apparent totalities, which contain, override or rationalize change, are projected.

In literature the most common of these false totalities is ‘tradition’, which is seen not as it is, an active and continuous selection and reselection, which even at its latest point in time is always a set of specific choices, but now more conveniently as an object, a projected reality, with which we have to come to terms on its terms, even though those terms are always and must be the valuations, the selections and omissions, of other men. The idea of a fixed syllabus is the most ordinary methodological product of just this assumption. And of course, given this kind of totality, the facts of change can then be admitted, but in particular ways. We can be positively invited to study the history of literature: only now not as change but as variation, a series of variations within a static totality: the characteristics of this period and the characteristics of that other; just as in empirical history we come to know this period and that, but the ‘and’ is not stressed, or is in any case understood as temporal variation rather than as qualitative change.

Similar false totalities have been very widely projected in economics, in political theory, in anthropology and even in contemporary sociology, where variation is seen as a fact but as only a fact, which does not necessarily involve us with the disturbing process of active values and choices. Certainly, as is so often said, we cannot do without the facts, and it is a hard, long effort to get them. But this persuasive empiricism is founded, from the beginning, on the assumption that the facts can be made to stand still, and to be, as we are, disinterested. Theory, we are told, can come later, but the important point is that it is there, tacitly, from the beginning, in the methodological assumption of a static, passive and therefore empirically available totality. The most obvious example, from literary studies, is the methodology of the study of ‘kinds’ or ‘genres’. There, making all the empirical work possible, is the prior assumption of the existence, within the ‘body’ of literature, of such ‘permanent forms’ as epic, tragedy, or romance, and then all our active study is of variations within them, variations that may be admitted to have proximate causes, even a social history, but that in their essential features are taken in practice as autonomous, with internal laws: an a priori and idealist assumption which prevents us not only from seeing the important history of the generation of such forms—which whatever might be said are never in fact timeless—but also from seeing those radical and qualitative changes, within the nominal continuity of the forms, which are often of surpassing importance in themselves, and which indeed, at times, make a quite different method of study, a method not depending on that kind of general classification, imperative.