RAYMOND WILLIAMS AND THE ENGLISH NOVEL 47 The struggle with which that process confronts us now is, I believe, the struggle to create public meanings which are authentic forums: to create a society whose values are at once commonly created and criticized, and where the discussions and exclusions of class may be replaced by the reality of common and equal membership. That, still, is the idea of a common culture... .6 In his call for the democratization of culture, Williams is breaking away from the tradition of Arnold and Leavis, key figures in any discussion of 'culture*. For Arnold, culture is the '... pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know . . . the best that has been thought and said in the world. . .'7 Leavis, on the other hand, finds himself facing a modern industrial society with its attendant phenomena of mass production and mass media, which in turn h^ve created mass society, where the decline in the quality of life and standards of aesthetic value can only be deplored in the strongest terms: 'What we have lost is the organic community... .'8 Williams, however, dismisses the notion of 'organic community* as a pastoral myth in The Country and the City. In fact, Leavis's concept 4 a sort of Utopia in retrospect. In order to regain this lost community, the elite would have a specific role to play. By the elite, Leavis refers neither to religious nor to political leaders but to intellectuals, believing that 'in any period it is upon a very small minority that the discerning appreciation of art and literature depends... .*9 For Arnold, the appreciation of art and literature is the means by which culture can be attained; in Leavis art is culture; Williams takes culture to mean an ever-evolving process, arising out of 'a whole way of life'. In The Long Revolution, Williams points out that there are three levels of culture operative at any particular point in time—the 'lived culture' of a certain period that is only experienced by the people then alive, the 'recorded culture' evident in art, buildings or dress, and the culture of the 'selective tradition'.10 The hegemonic process involved in the selection or rejection of a tradition depends upon the effective dominant culture which operates at all levels of society in subtle ways: The processes of education; the processes of a much wider social training within institutions like the family; the practical definitions and organization of work; the selective tradition at an intellectual and theoretical level; all these forces are involved in a continual making and remaking of an effective dominant culture, and on them, as experienced, as built into our living, its reality depends.11 Mor^ specifically, the same process is evident in the construction of literary traditions and canons Williaips began his career as a literary critic with Reading and Criticism (1950), although it was not until 1971 that he again published a consolidated book on the novel. The English