Raymond Williams is widely acknowledged as one of the mostoriginal and influential cultural thinkers of the post-war era,and this essay aims to analyze/critique the cultural theories headvances in both Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution(1961), his early major works generally acclaimed as two of thefounding texts of British cultural studies. As Williams claimed,his Culture and Society was "oppositional." What he opposedwas F.R. Leavis's elitist concept of culture, which, obviously,derives from Matthew Arnold's famous definition in Culture andAnarchy that culture contains "the best that has been thoughtand known in the world." The very function that Arnold wouldhave culture to perform is to "seek to do away with classes;"culture, in this high-brow sense, serves instead to separateand exclude, for a vast majority of human population, e.g, theworking class and the farming laborers, is not counted at all inthe daily production of values and meanings. To counteract thislong traditional thinking about culture and society, Williamsproposed that "culture is ordinary," for culture refers to thewhole way of life, a proposition later taken up by the Center forContemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University as its verysubject position from which it targets the official culture.