Raymond Williams was born on August 31, 1921, a hundred years ago today, and died in January 1988 at the age of sixty-six. He would be remembered as a leading figure of the intellectual left in Britain, particularly his native Wales, and as one of the founding fathers of cultural studies.

He made his name with a series of detailed, thoughtful, stubbornly radical analyses of literature, culture, and politics, as well as novels and dramas — and it is above all this “cultural” Williams who is remembered on the modern left. But in the last two decades of his life, he embarked on a different kind of rethinking of socialist theory and practice — less well-known, but if anything, more relevant to the problems we face today.

Raymond Williams was one of the earliest voices calling for socialists and environmentalists to work together, and he backed up that urgency with his own searching inquiry into how an ecosocialist project could rethink the relations between humans and nature.