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.