34 SOCIAL SCIENTIST through Marxism which is characteristic of an intellectual's radicalisation. But politics, as we remember, was one of the twin poles of his Romantic anti-capitalist preoccupation. In the journal he started soon after the WW I—Politics and Letters—the other was 'literature'. As a Cambridge School product, literature was important to Williams in two senses: as the received historical 'tradition' it was the significant record of a kind and quality of lived culture which, in its felt lack in the modern times, demanded to be studied, taught and passed on as a guide for any valid social thinking. In the present its value was altogether different. In its encounter with the lived details of life, literature signified in the present a creative exploration by and of consciousness. In this its mode of cognition was held to be qualitatively different and higher than the epistemology of systemic social sciences. By extension literature then stood for 'subjectivity' in all its malleability as it continuously discovered itself, surprised itself, found itself, through; living in the objective world, the objective world itself was not the-given material entity of the Descartean schism: it was, on the other hand, very much an active social world. From Politics and Letters up to the discovery of Gramsci and Goldmann, Williams' problem was how to socially explain this creative consciousness so that it would not be positivistically reduced as the epiphenomenon of some other, usually economic, element of society. Eliot's conservative way out of this problem was through the schism between the anthropological culture as 'a whole way of life' and the redefined Arnoldian culture as the quality of an accomplished and discriminating consciousness. Reductive Marxists in the thirties saw no problem here at all in that the great explanatory formula of base-superstructure had already explained everything and it was only a question of its next 'application'. Most of Williams' holistic writing with reference to literature and other discursive writings up to his confrontation with continental Marxism is taken up with the problem of finding an alternative approach to Eliot and the reductive Marxists. For a long time he tried 'systemic organicism' as a solution—a position by which he came to view society as organically related to familial, communicational, economic, and political systems.^ It must be added here at once that Williams was not subscribing to the fallacy of 'expressive totality' in this exercise. In the dual attempt to counter the positivistic and mechanistic crudities of English Marxism about creative consciousness and the conservative consecration of elitism, Williams' 'systemic organicism' took on the colours of ethicalism. The politics and cultural criticism of this period following from these concerns and positions require a separate analysis which falls outside