idealized the rural past, made it impossible for either side to see, as Raymond Williams notes in his study of this debate, that a "rural economy simply had to persist," in one or another form, even in the "developed metropolitan countries." The long literary controversy between town and country was a pseudo-debate because both sides agreed on the central premise, as Williams puts it, that "the rural experience, the working country, had gone; that in Britain it was only a marginal thing, and that as time went by this would be so everywhere." Williams himself accepted this assumption, he says, "for much longer than now seems possible," until he finally came to understand that the "common idea of a lost rural world" not only rested on a hopelessly abstract view of historical processes but implied an equally misleading view of the future, "in which work on the land will have to become more rather than less important and central." But this kind of common sense unfortunately played no part either in the literature of lost country life or in the ostensibly opposing literature of progress and development. ^*

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In The Country and the City (1973), Williams rejected both the "retrospective radicalism" that idealized a lost golden age of English agriculture and the socialism of "certain metropolitan intellectuals," with its celebration of capitalism as a progressive force (hence the necessary preparation for socialism), its ridicule of the "idiocy of rural life" (as Marx called it), and its assumption of a unilinear global progress toward a culmination foreshadowed by the megalopolitan civilization of the industrialized nations. "Between the simple backward look and the simple progressive thrust there is room for long argument but none for enlightenment. We must begin differently," Williams argued—with history, which dissolves the notion of "traditional society" common to both the idyllic and the progressive interpretations of the rural past. Reviewers praised Williams's book but paid no attention to its contention that agriculture would have to become more important in the future and that the split between the country and the city could be overcome only by resisting both of the stereotypes that dominated the old debate. Instead they saw Williams as another uprooted intellectual unsuccessfully attempting to recover his rural past—a "transitional man," according to Allan Goldfein, who knew the "agony of separation from roots, the conflict of values, the hesitant (and certainly guilt-provoking) adoption of urban ways, the sense of loss of the past." Marshall Berman found the book "incisive and luminous," "admirably honest and courageous," "full of insight and beauty." It had "emotional unity and momentum," according to Berman. As this kind of praise indicates, however, Berman judged the book in purely aesthetic terms and lost sight of its argument. He trivialized the issues at stake by reducing them to personal issues. Williams could not

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