Raymond Williams 'Definition Of The Annales' Ideal Culture

complexity ' .12 What the book achieved was the sense that such a tradition existed. It was mainly a British tradition because industrial revolution began in England, but Williams suggested that comparable changes happened in other societies. Words can be objects of cultural and social investigation: philology is not simply buried in the dust of ancient texts, it carries on the work of social history and the history of technologies.
The same work is done by Lucien Febvre, one of the founders, together with Marc Bloch, of the Annales: in an article of 1928, he analysed the transformations of the term frontiere (border), the way in which, in the sixteenth century, its dominant meaning ceased to be architectonic and military as it came increasingly to signify the demarcation between countries. 13

This importance of meanings is also the basis of Raymond Williams 's definition of culture. In The Long Revolution, he spoke of three definitions of culture: ideal, documentary and social. Ideal culture is a state or process of human perfection with a permanent reference to universal values; documentary culture is the body of intellectual and imaginative words that record human thought and experience; social culture is a whole way of life 'which expresses certain meanings and values not only in art and learning but also in institutions and ordinary behaviour '