Raymond Williams on Britain and America

An amazing characterization of Raymond Williams of the American intellectual space, which is too often just summed up under the vague term "democratic." If Williams too succumbs to the cliché of American intellectual space as democratic, he at least gives us a few new adjectives in his comparison of America to Cambridge that have the potential to make people more precise about what this entails:

I think many people have now noticed the long-term effects of the specific social situation of British intellectuals: a situation which is changing but with certain continuing effects. In humane studies, at least, and with mixed results, British thinkers and writers are continually pulled back towards ordinary language: not only in certain rhythms and in choices of words, but also in a manner of exposition which can be called unsystematic but which also represents an unusual consciousness of an immediate audience: a sharing and equalstanding community, to which it is equally possible to defer or to reach out. I believe that there are many positive aspects of this habitual manner, but I am just as sure that the negative aspects are serious: a willingness to share, or at least not too explicitly to challenge, the consciousness of the group of which the thinker and writer—his description as intellectual raises the precise point—is willingly or unwillingly but still practically a member. And while this group, for so long, and of course especially in places like Cambridge, was in effect and detail a privileged and at times a ruling class, this pull towards ordinary language was often, is often, a pull towards current consciousness: a framing of ideas within certain polite but definite limits...
[And then] there was American work: in what appeared the same language but outside this particular English consensus. Theory, or at least system, seemed attractively available. And most American intellectuals, for good or ill, seemed not to have shared this particular integration with a non-intellectual class. Complaints that a man explaining his life’s work, in as precise a way as he could, was not instantly comprehensible, in a clubbable way, to someone who had just happened to drop in from his labour or leisure elsewhere, seemed less often to arise.
-"Literature and Sociology," in Culture and Materialism (also available here).

In other words, what Williams sees here is a disjunction between the ordinary or "common" vocabulary of British intellectuals and the commoners themselves. British intellectuals, he is saying, maintain the fiction that their work is pragmatic because it is put in a certain language. What this does is only highlight how specialized and intellectual they are. So the ordinary language is 1) not the plain speak of common people in the first place, and 2) actually coopts whatever is connected to the commoners (or non-intellectuals) to produce intellectual cliques. In other words, people pretend to be relevant but they aren't: all that is produced is a "consensus," which, like consensus in politics, is most of the time merely an agreement that doesn't really get anything done, being just for show. So it isn't surprising that the non-intellectual comes into a lecture and says what he does: the actual language of the people (whether good or not) confronts the fiction of the British intellectual's "ordinary language," which, in the meantime, merely serves to hinder or hold back thoughts that only a more technical vocabulary could get at. The word "integration" here is used both satirically and as a genuine criticism of America though: it is the name for this fiction of the British intellectuals, but it is also a name for the more genuine disparity between intellectuals and the American people.