The England that he had previously only encountered through its literature now confronted him as a reality, and he developed a “migrant’s-eye” view of the center from the margins. Thus the erstwhile colonial subject came to develop his own anthropology of the culture of the colonizers. He sought to survive the medieval gloom of Oxford by making common cause with the displaced migrant minority—with the rebel enclaves of demobbed young veterans and national servicemen, Ruskin College trade unionists, and scholarship boys and girls from home and abroad. 12 So far as the dominant forms of British culture were concerned, in this context, as he put it, “What I realized, as soon as I got to Oxford, was that I could never be part of it.… I could study English literature on the page, but I could never be part of that life.” That ambivalent feeling stuck with him throughout his life, and many years later he would still say, “I don’t belong anywhere anymore. Britain is my home, but I’m not English.” 13 This, however, was far from being any simple matter of regret. As he put it when speaking at a conference on the question of identity in London in 1987, “My own sense of identity has always depended on the fact of being a migrant.… [Now] I find myself centered at last. Now that in the postmodern age you all feel so dispersed. I’ve become centered: what I thought of as dispersed and fragmented comes paradoxically, to be the representative modern experience.… Welcome to migranthood!” 14

Many have commented on the perennial warmth of Stuart’s manners, which, in a lived form of the politics of affect, functioned as a complexly articulated complement to his deep intellectual seriousness (as he might perhaps have put it himself). 23 Indeed, for such a rigorous thinker, Hall displayed unusual kindness, tolerance, and generosity of spirit—but this seemingly contradictory combination was in fact central to his character. This combination of personal warmth and intellectual rigor lasted throughout his life and can be seen to telling effect in Isaac Julien’s film of the “Choreographing Capital” event. 24 In one scene in the film, from his wheelchair, Stuart engages David Harvey in public debate about the deficiencies of what he saw as Harvey’s economistic determinism, which, so far as Stuart was concerned, lacked any sense of conjunctural mediation of the manner in which economic factors might have their various effects. In the interview Stuart remains as courteous and well-mannered as ever but is nonetheless relentless in his determination to push his critique of Harvey’s position through to the ultimate conclusion of its own internal logic. At one point he apologizes to Harvey for the discomfort, saying that he recognizes that “I am perhaps pushing you further than you feel comfortable to go.” Yet his sense of intellectual responsibility will not permit him to allow their serious theoretical disagreement (about what role the economic can play in constituting an adequate explanation of events) to be fudged, simply in order to avoid a conflict he regards as intellectually and politically necessary. 25

Perhaps most notably, Stuart took this cultural analysis of politics forward in his collaboration with Martin Jacques and the members of the Marxism Today collective in producing his pathbreaking analysis of the emergence of the form of politics which from the late 1970s came to dominate the British landscape for the next generation. He and his coauthors argued that any model that used the concept of false consciousness to explain away working-class support for these forms of conservative politics was utterly inadequate. What was needed, he claimed, was an understanding of the capacity of political ideologies such as this to articulate an effective appeal to the lived experience of subordinate groups. 34 In his closing remarks to a British Sociological Association conference in May 1978, Stuart insists that while racism is certainly an ideology which serves the function of refracting quite other problems onto the question of race, it is not “a set of phoney conspiracies in the heads of the ruling class.” He argues that it is not to be seen (and cannot usefully be opposed) simply as a set of “false … or … mistaken … perceptions” but rather that it has its roots “in real … material conditions of existence … and arises because of the concrete problems of different classes and groups in the society … especially in an economy in recession.… [It] has these authentic, material conditions at its roots … involv[ing] the real problems of the people.” 35

The CCCS ’s collectively authored book Policing the Crisis (published in 1978; see chapter 12 of this volume) had identified race as a defining feature of the increasingly conservative form of authoritarian populism developed by Margaret Thatcher. Stuart then coined the term “Thatcherism” in a prescient article, “The Great Moving Right Show,” in Marxism Today (included in this collection, chapter 13 ) in January 1979, some months before Thatcher herself was elected. 36 Up until then, she had been patronized by many on the Left as an insignificant, shrill-sounding housewifely voice espousing an anachronistic form of old-fashioned domestic moralism. However, Stuart recognized her as a person who, in Hegel’s terms, constituted a historic individual—whose politics instantiated, in personal form, and served to crystalize much wider social and political forces that were already in play. To this extent, he rightly recognized that Thatcherism might be able to redefine the public mood, and appeal to the disaffected, through its appeal on moral and cultural grounds that had previously not been considered as part of the political agenda. Thus he argued for the necessity of a corresponding cultural struggle against Thatcherism, and his great regret, twenty years later, in the run-up to the 1997 general election was that Thatcherite arguments, philosophies, and priorities still defined the agenda on which New Labor founded its own appeal. 37 A further decade and a half on, one of his last published works, “After Neoliberalism: Analysing the Present” (jointly written with his longtime Soundings coeditors Doreen Massey and Michael Rustin), once again focused on these same themes, in the attempt to articulate a form of political opposition to the international hegemony of neoliberalism that avoided a return to fundamentalist Leftism. 38

As Kuan-Hsing Chen and I have noted elsewhere, Stuart was never interested in modes of intellectual work that, in absolutist terms, present themselves as definitively superseding all that went before. 39 His concerns were always conjunctural in nature, developing in response to emerging social and political questions. His strengths lay not in making definitive statements but in his capacity to take on new political or theoretical issues and his determination to continually try to move beyond his own previous limits. He always worked to encourage an open-ended approach to debate and the politics of discipleship or denunciation were equally anathema to him. He refused the temptation to enhance his own arguments by rubbishing those of others. His tendency was always toward a productive sort of eclecticism that looked for the best (or most useful) points which could be taken from other positions and then worked on them in a selective, syncretic mode of dialogic inclusiveness. He had no interest in the production of any exclusive orthodoxy—not least because such systems of thought, after enjoying a brief (if absolute) intellectual reign, tend then to be dethroned and discarded in favor of another. In his view, the production of a succession of temporarily fashionable theoretical paradigms offered no useful model of intellectual life. 40

Naturally, this approach was cause for consternation among those of a more conventionally Marxist orientation. Colin Sparks complained that the demotion of class from its position as the “ultimate cause” and source of final determinations was a “crippling incapacity” of the more populist forms of Cultural Studies. 49 However, far from being unaware of this danger, in a later interview (1996) Stuart explicitly bemoaned the fact that class had subsequently fallen off the agenda of Cultural Studies. As he put it, “In the early days, perhaps we spoke too much about the working class and subcultures. Now, nobody talks about that at all: they talk about myself, my mother, my father, my friends, and that is a very narrow experience in relation to classes.” 50 Of course, for Stuart, any return to the question of class could not simply go back to the classical Marxist perspective that Sparks invoked; it needed to be handled so as to articulate the analysis of social classes, race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, nation and global capital, into a forceful explanatory framework adequate for the analysis of our contemporary situation.

In some quarters, this engagement with aesthetic matters in the Black Arts movement was treated as a new (or even a surprising) development. However, as Stuart explains in the interview in chapter 9 of the succeeding volume, in many ways this simply took him back to his early interest in documentary photography. 57 Moreover, as made clear in an interview with Colin MacCabe in 2007, so far as he was concerned, he had been involved in arguments about aesthetics for almost fifty years, ever since writing The Popular Arts with Paddy Whannel. His aesthetic position was always premised on the notion that deconstructing the claims of high art to monopolize aesthetic value does not in any way involve uncritically celebrating all aspects of popular art. For Stuart, the argument about any particular cultural form still has to be evaluative, and the value of any particular manifestation of popular art has to be established by close critical attention. As he scathingly remarks, the kind of “flat populism” that came to prevail in some sections of Cultural Studies (as in the critiques made by Simon Frith and Jon Savage) is no use at all in this endeavor. For him, it remained crucial to be able to make distinctions of value that would enable us to identify (in the example he chooses) precisely why Billie Holiday is far better than other popular singers: because, he explains, her voice can be argued to find a form of expression for a complex range of feelings and experiences toward which others can only gesture. While he is concerned to destabilize the uncritical canonization of the established hierarchies of fine art and to argue for the potential value of the popular, the fine-grained process of evaluation of what exactly it is about one piece of art that makes it better than another remains crucial. As he explains it, what he is interested in is “the decanonization of the (established) categories” alongside the “retention of the critical function.” As always with Stuart, that is a Big Ask. But equally, to return to my earlier comments on his interest in—and commitment to—opening up, rather than closing down, debates, this is also a creative reposing of the questions at stake. 58

This part begins with Stuart’s retrospective assessment of the profound role played by Richard Hoggart’s work (and in particular The Uses of Literacy , which appeared in 1957) in opening up the terrain of Cultural Studies and laying the ground for much of what followed. By the time the article was written in 2007 there was much talk of the “cultural turn” in the social sciences, noted earlier. However, little of that was as generous as Stuart is here in recognizing the crucial role played by the early work of Hoggart and Raymond Williams in enabling this development. In acknowledging what Cultural Studies learned from and owed to their work, not least methodologically, Stuart begins, as so often, by locating its emergence within a particular conjuncture. His periodization sets the roots of Cultural Studies in Britain in the wider frame of the post–World War II emergence of relatively affluent social democracies in Europe. Thus, the emergence of Cultural Studies in Britain also marks the moment when the idea of a consumer-driven “affluent society” emerged, to use the phrase popularized by J. K. Galbraith in the US and later taken up by the sociologists John Goldthorpe and David Lockwood in their influential study of the new figure of the “affluent worker” in Britain, who was thought by some to herald the arrival of a (relatively) classless society. 1

It is pertinent to ask, then, not only how much it owed to and derived from the discourse of “Kulturkritik” but how far and in what significant ways did it break with that discourse? What were the methodological and conceptual innovations implicit in its practice of writing and thinking on which new directions could be built? One can list them without elaboration. A very different conception of “culture” is at work here from that which animates the tradition of Kulturkritik. By “culture,” Hoggart meant how working-class people spoke and thought, what language and common assumptions about life they shared, in speech and action, what social attitudes informed their daily practice, what moral categories they deployed, even if only aphoristically, to make judgments about their own behavior and that of others—including, of course, how they brought all this to bear on what they read, saw, and sang. This view of culture as the practices of “making sense” was very far removed indeed from “culture” as the ideal court of judgment, whose touchstone was “the best that has been thought and said,” which animated the tradition from Arnold to Eliot and Leavis. The aim to make culture in the former sense a central and necessary part of the object of study, however fitfully achieved, was as defining a break as Williams’s third definition in The Long Revolution— culture as “ways of life”—and, moreover, despite significant differences, a break moving in a parallel direction . This was a formative moment for Cultural Studies.

We cannot discuss this in detail here but we can see the broad contours of this shift much more clearly in retrospect. There was a postwar boom, with rising living standards. The long-term redistributive shift was much more limited than the prophets estimated (though Immanuel Wallerstein is right to argue that it was quite enough to scare capital out of its wits and provoked the great counter-surge of globalization, market forces, the neoliberal revolution, and the “new world order”). In fact, affluence did not represent “classlessness” as such: rather, it marked the early stages of that long transition (not yet completed) from the older, tiered, socially embedded class structures and Protestant ethic typical of Western European bourgeois societies to the more truncated, “post-industrial” class structures, based on corporate capital, money, celebrity lifestyle, hedonism, and consumption. Underlying this was the prolonged shift from nineteenth-century entrepreneurial capitalism, via the apotheosis of the “high noon” of imperialism, the First World War, the failure of the proletarian “moment,” and the interwar Depression, to the great surge of power represented by the concentrations of corporate capitalism, the managerial revolution, and Fordist economies of scale of the late twentieth century. Mass society, mass culture, mass consumerism, and mass markets were integral aspects of this historic shift: precisely how to understand their real interdependencies remains one of Cultural Studies’ unfulfilled tasks—probably lost forever in the hyper-theoretical and post-political climate that came to prevail. Of course, in the immediate decades after The Uses of Literacy , the shape of things was to be dominated by the historic compromise of the welfare state and the social-democratic consensus. But by the end of the 1970s—and massively reorganized on a global scale—the forces we were trying to understand began to return to the stage with unstoppable force and did, indeed, change the world.