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It was above all, as I have said, the received formula of base and superstructure which made Marxist accounts of literature and thought often weak in practice. Yet to many people, still, this formula is near the centre of Marxism, and indicates its appropriate methodology for cultural history and criticism, and then of course for the relation between social and cultural studies. The economic base determines the social relations which determine consciousness which determines actual ideas and works. There can be endless debate about each of these terms, but unless something very like that is believed, Marxism appears to have lost its most specific challenging position.

Now for my own part I have always opposed the formula of base and superstructure: not primarily because of its methodological weaknesses but because of its rigid, abstract and static character. Further, from my work on the nineteenth century, I came to view it as essentially a bourgeois formula; more specifically, a central position of utilitarian thought. I did not want to give up my sense of the commanding importance of economic activity and history. My inquiry in Culture and Society had begun from just that sense of a transforming change. But in theory and practice I came to believe that I had to give up, or at least to leave aside, what I knew as the Marxist tradition: to attempt to develop a different kind of theory of social totality; to see the study of culture as the study of relations between elements in a whole way of life; to find ways of studying structure, in particular works and periods, which could stay in touch with and illuminate particular art-works and forms, but also forms and relations of more general social life; to replace the formula of base and superstructure with the more active idea of a field of mutually if also unevenly determining forces. That was the project of The Long Revolution, and it seems to me extraordinary, looking back, that I did not then know the work of Lukács or of Goldmann, which would have been highly relevant to it, and especially as they were working within a more conscious tradition and in less radical an isolation. I did not even then know, or had forgotten, Marx’s analysis of the theory of utility, in The German Ideology, in which—as I now find often happens in reading and re-reading Marx—what I had felt about the reductionism of the base-superstructure formula was given a very precise historical and analytic focus.

This being so, it is easy to imagine my feelings when I discovered an active and developed Marxist theory, in the work of Lukács and Goldmann, which was exploring many of the same areas with many of the same concepts, but also with others in a quite different range. The fact that I learned simultaneously that it had been denounced as heretical, that it was a return to Left Hegelianism, left-bourgeois idealism, and so on, did not, I am afraid, detain me. If you’re not in a church you’re not worried about heresies; it is only (but it is often) the most routinized Marxism, or the most idealist revolutionism, which projects that kind of authoritative, believing, formation. The only serious criterion was actual theory and practice.

What both Lukács and, following him, Goldmann had to say about reification seemed to me the real advance. For here the dominance of economic activity over all other forms of human activity, the dominance of its values over all other values, was given a precise historical explanation: that this dominance, this deformation, was the specific characteristic of capitalist society, and that in modern organized capitalism this dominance—as indeed one can observe—was increasing, so that this reification, this false objectivity, was more thoroughly penetrating every other kind of life and consciousness. The idea of totality was then a critical weapon against this precise deformation; indeed, against capitalism itself. And yet this was not idealism—as assertion of the primacy of other values. On the contrary, just as the deformation could be understood, at its roots, only by historical analysis of a particular kind of economy, so the attempt to overcome and surpass it lay not in isolated witness or in separated activity but in practical work to find, to assert and to establish more human social ends in more human political and economic means.

At the most practical level it was easy for me to agree. But then the whole point of thinking in terms of a totality is the realization that we are part of it; that our own consciousness, our work, our methods, are then critically at stake. And in the particular field of literary analysis there was this obvious difficulty: that most of the work we had to look at was the product of just this epoch of reified consciousness, so that what looked like the theoretical breakthrough might become, quite quickly, the methodological trap. I cannot yet say this finally about Lukács, since I still don’t have access to all his work; but in some of it, at least, the major insights of History and Class-Consciousness, which he has now partly disavowed, do not get translated into critical practice, and certain cruder operations—essentially still those of base and superstructure—keep reappearing. I still read Goldmann collaboratively and critically asking the same question, for I am sure the practice of totality is still for any of us, at any time, profoundly and even obviously difficult.

Yet advances have been made, and I want to acknowledge them. In particular Goldmann’s concepts of structure, and his distinctions of kinds of consciousness—based on but developed from Lukács—seem to me very important. And they are important above all for the relation between literary and social studies. At a simpler level, many points of contact between literature and sociology can be worked on: studies of the reading public, for example, where literary analysis of the works being read and sociological analysis of the real formations of the public have hardly yet at all been combined. Or the actual history of writers, as changing historical groups, in any full critical relation to the substance of their works. Or the social history of literary forms, in their full particularity and variety but also in the complex of their relation with other formations. I attempted each of these kinds of analysis in a preliminary way in The Long Revolution, but I felt then and have felt ever since a crucial absence of collaborators, and especially of people who did not say or have to say, as we approached the most difficult central problems, that there, unfortunately, was the limit of their field.

Goldmann, of course, did not accept these limits. He spoke now as sociologist, now as critic, now as cultural historian; but also, in his own intellectual tradition, a philosophy and a sociology were there from the beginning; the patient literary studies began from that fact. Thus, when he spoke of structures, he was consciously applying a term and a method which did not so much cross as underlie the apparently separate disciplines. It is a term and a method of consciousness, and so the relation between literature and sociology is not a relation between, on the one hand, various individual works and on the other hand various empirical facts. The real relation is within a totality of consciousness: a relation that is assumed and then revealed rather than apprehended and then expounded. Much that has to be proved, in our own tradition—and especially the very existence of significant primary relations between literature and society—can there be surpassed, in general philosophical and sociological terms, before the particular analyses begin. Looking at our work it could be said that we lacked a centre, in any developed philosophy or sociology. Looking at his work—and for all his differences he was representative of the whole other tradition—it could be said that he had a received centre, at the level of reasoning, before the full contact with substance began.