1. Hoggart's book is more a literary memoir than a scholarly analysis. The book , written with a novelist's eye for evocative details, is based mostly on his own recollections, supplemented by an unsystematic collection of data from other sources. He is critical of statistics (18), but a use of statistics, appropriately placed in their context, like Bourdieu does, would make his conclusions much more convincing.

2. When investigating mass culture, intellectuals will instinctively look at mass publications, since they are a "literary" source. This is what Hoggart advertises that he is going to do, and he may have done more of it in the portions of the book we did not read. However, such sources must be treated warily. You have to be aware of who is writing and publishing before you can claim that the views in those publications are a true portrait of the working class. If statistics need social context so do mass publications. As Williams writes, "do we not too easily construct from such evidence a contemptuous version of the lives of our contemporaries?" (200) Hoggart admits that working class culture has a resilient core, which blocks an easy identification of the contents of mass publications with working class culture.

3. Intellectuals have a difficult time coming to a proper view of the working class, especially if they have risen out of that class, as Hoggart did. They recognize the sufferings of the working class but are repulsed by much of working class culture. They therefore often react with a mixture of pity and romanticized condescension. My own view, having followed an attenuated version of Hoggart's path, is that I wish everyone were middle class. I realize this would exchange a shared, gregarious space for a degree of blandness, but it would lose the debilitating worries about money, which, for me, is the dominating characteristic of working class life. There are also aspects of working class culture--studio wrestling and hunting animals from helicopters--that I will never cease to find appalling.

4. Williams's chief concern in the selection we read is to decide whether art is useful, especially in a mass industrialized age. He finds neither of the three approaches to the question satisfactory, and neither do I, although sometimes for different reasons. Richards's approach, in
my view, is too reductionist. Richards thinks values are prescientific concepts and therefore
appeals to organization, which he defines as a quasi-biological category, as the justification for
art. Great art will create a better organized brain. Human behavior cannot be reduced to merely biological reactions, and thus when you add in the cognitive, personal level at which humans live, the messages of literature will reappear.

5. Leavis brings back value, but, by restricting it to only a minority, his approach is too elitist. His method of dealing with mass culture is too easy: he can just ignore it as beneath contempt. His approach is really a nostalgia for an aristocratic culture. Rigid opposition to mass culture leads to opposition to democracy and universal education. I think it is possible to have values without elitism and agree with Williams when he writes, "cultural training ought essentially to be training in democracy." (203) Leavis's organic society had many disadvantages. The phenomenon of Progress has been progress, although not, of course, unalloyed progress.
Unfortunately, we could not have had most of the good without some of the bad.

6. Marxism creates a problem for intellectual and artists. They are often sympathetic to its
political goals, but its official line, no matter how it is made more nuanced, has to devalue intellect and art. Material relations create consciousness, not vice versa. Williams recognizes this
is nonsense: it involves "forcing and superficiality." (281) It is true that no one can react to,
for example, horrendous working conditions before they exist, but it is clear that artistic and intellectual attacks on social conditions, of which Marx provides one example, have had decisive impacts. Marx claimed that Hegel needed to be flipped over, but it is Marx that needs to be flipped over. Economic change flows from new ideas, from knowledge. To think otherwise, to
treat consciousness as epiphenomonal, is as reductionist as Richards's biologism. Williams also recognized that the Marxist approach to culture has political implications. (281) Once adopted the Gulag and the Khmer Rouge will not be far behind. If economic change flows from ideas, then our political arrangements should be individualist and not statist.