pointed out, except to deprive twentieth-century radicals of his insight into the "redefinition of what politics should be"—the lesson radicals most need to master. Taken to task by the editors of the New Left Review, who complained that "Carlyle was an unbridled racist and imperialist" and that the sympathetic portrait of Carlyle in Culture and Society was "incomprehensible," Williams objected to "this marshalling of who were the progressive thinkers and who were the reactionary thinkers in the nineteenth century." He too had written his undergraduate "essay on Carlyle as a fascist." By the I950s, however, he had "discovered themes profoundly related" to his "sense of the social crisis" of his time "not in the approved list of progressive thinkers" but in "paradoxical figures" like Burke, Carlyle, and Ruskin, who defied left-wing canonization but usually had more interesting things to say about modern life than those who marched under the banner of progress.

In retrospect, Williams conceded that his attempt to reconstruct a tradition of social criticism resistant to conventional political classifications did not do justice to the full range of his subjects' opinions. "The right thing to do would have been to argue the case of each thinker fully and explicitly through and say what was wrong with them." Williams's concession was misplaced. There is no reason a book like Culture and Society, the purpose of which is to trace the history of an intellectual tradition, ought to stop at every point to consider writers' works in their totality, to argue the case for and against them, and thus to arrive at a comprehensive set of carefully balanced judgments. Such a procedure is not only unworkable, requiring a full-length treatment of all the important writers under consideration, but irrelevant to the purposes of such a work. The important objection to Williams's treatment of Carlyle is not that he failed to call attention to Carlyle's reactionary views (which he explicitly condemned) but that he placed Carlyle in the wrong tradition—that of Burkean communitarianism rather than Christian prophecy.

At least Williams did not take refuge, however, in the usual academic evasion that Carlyle was a purely literary figure who should not be held accountable for his opinions at all. Political criticism is a risky business, especially in the case of a writer who combined the most penetrating judgments with a good deal of nonsense; and it is always tempting, therefore, to retreat into literary criticism. Thus Harold Bloom calls Carlyle a "prophet of sensibility," who saw that "authority could be established

-241-