A rich and illuminating portrait of a leading figure of Britain’s New Left whose ideas about democracy and the influence of mass media speak to us with renewed urgency today

Raymond Williams (1921–1988) was an intellectual giant of the decades between World War Two and the end of the Cold War. He was a founding theorist of television and other media who showed how these technologies can have very different effects on our social world depending on who owns them and whose purposes they serve. A socialist with deep strains of both liberalism and conservatism, a fierce critic of capitalism, and an opponent of all forms of arbitrary power, Williams believed in deepening democracy and argued that this was possible only with a deepened sense of community. A World Worth Sharing examines his life and writings, revealing why he is a thinker for our time.

Williams came from a small, working-class village on the Welsh-English border. In novels, historical studies, and theoretical writings, he demonstrates how the experience of rural laborers and industrial workers remains essential to building a more just and humane world. His writings explore the deep and subtle interpenetrations of politics with culture, identity, experience, place, and loyalty. Political theorist and essayist Jedediah Britton-Purdy brings the same subtlety and sympathy to Williams, introducing a new generation to pathbreaking works such as The Country and the City, Culture and Society, Television, and Keywords as well as Williams’s lesser-known novels and their potential for transforming how we think about politics. This book is a critical study of Williams’s call for a democratic future founded on new relationships with each other and the land, one in which reciprocity and mutual appreciation triumph over manipulation and exploitation. It is also a part of the tradition of humane, open-spirited, and democratic radicalism that Williams shaped.

A timely meditation for the age of AI, A World Worth Sharing is a thought-provoking account of a writer and thinker who believed that a better life depends on whether ordinary people can take control of new technology and foster more democratic ways of living together.