In his introduction to Culture and Society: 1780–1950, Raymond Williams begins by noting five key words he says came into common use or changed their meanings significantly in the first half of the period that is his subject. The changes in the meaning and usage of these words reflect wider changes in society. The five words Williams selects are "industry, democracy, class, art and culture."

Williams then spends the next few pages explaining precisely how the meanings of the these words have changed. Industry, for instance, once referred to the human capacity for hard work. Since the Industrial Revolution, however, it has come to be "a collective word for our manufacturing and productive institutions, and for their general activities."

Having examined his chosen five words in detail, Williams then gives many more new words, or words with new meanings, and reveals his purpose in relation to the changes he has noted. This is to describe and explain "the relations within this general pattern of change." The relations to which Williams refers come under the general heading of "culture," the one of his original five words that has changed its meaning most thoroughly and in the most complex manner. Williams summarizes his own ambitions for the book within the field of cultural analysis as follows:

I wish to show the emergence of culture as an abstraction and an absolute: an emergence which, in a very complex way, merges two general responses - first, the recognition of the practical separation of certain moral and intellectual activities from the driven impetus of a new kind of society; second, the emphasis of these activities, as a court of human appeal, to be set over the processes of practical social judgement and yet to offer itself as a mitigating and rallying alternative.

Essentially, Williams enunciates his intention of analyzing how culture emerges and becomes something separate from society and commenting on the complex relations between the two over time, hence the title of the book.