I was very sorry to hear about Stuart Hall this afternoon. A figure who tends not to get much coverage in academe or the left these days, his impact on the social sciences and socialist politics in Britain was deep and influential. When I started studying sociology in the early-mid 1990s, Hall’s work cast a benign shadow over the British intellectual scene. His was an attempt to come to grips with how politics and culture worked together for the benefit of prevailing configurations of class and power. In 1978’s Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and the Law Hall and his colleagues took up the idea of the moral panic. Continue reading
Tagged with Stuart Hall
Common-sense socialism – the way forward?
As the Party Conference season draws to a close, the disconnect between the politics of the Westminster bubble and the rest of us couldn’t be more obvious. Besuited figures, mostly men, addressing other besuited figures, mostly men, given huge chunks of airtime. All while party membership figures plummet and the great unsayable for the political class, that fewer and fewer can be bothered to vote at all scarcely gets a mention.
Stuart Hall was one of the founders of the 1950s British New Left. Decades later, he looked back in an autobiographical essay to explain why the New Left took popular culture seriously:
