Socialist ends: the British New Left, cultural studies and the emergence of academic ‘theory’

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Notes

1. By far the richest account of the topic I am concerned with is to be found in Dennis Dworkin's Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left, and the Origins of Cultural Studies, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997.

2. See Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961, pp 342 ff.

3. Richard Hoggart, ‘Speaking for Ourselves’, in Norman Mackenzie (ed.), Conviction, London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1958, p 138.

4. See Ken Alexander, ‘Convictions’, The New Reasoner 7, Winter 1958, pp 112–113.

5. See for these citations, Iris Murdoch, ‘The House of Theory’, in Norman Mackenzie (ed.), Conviction, London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1958, pp 298–315.

6. Murdoch, ‘The House of Theory’, p 228.

7. See Stuart Hall's acknowledgement of Cole in his ‘The New Left’, in Robin Archer (ed.), Out of Apathy: Voices of the New Left Thirty Years On, London: Verso, 1989, p 15.

8. See G D H Cole, ‘What is Happening to British Capitalism?’, University & New Left Review 1(1), Spring 1957, pp 24–27.

9. See Charles Taylor, ‘From Marxism to the Dialogue Society’, in Terry Eagleton and Brian Wicker (eds), From Culture to Revolution; the Slant Symposium, 1967, London: Sheed and Ward, 1968, p 181, for one such call.

10. See Michael Kenny, The First New Left: British Intellectuals After Stalin, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1995, pp 34 ff.; and Perry Anderson, Arguments within English Marxism, London: Verso, 1980, pp 136 ff. for the situation at the New Left Review at the time.

11. See Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977, pp 2–3, for Williams's own account of his relation to the New Left.

12. My sense of the British progressivist tradition owes much to David Blaazer, The Popular Front and the Progressive Tradition: Socialists, Liberals, and the Quest for Unity, 1884–1939, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

13. See Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Studies and the Centre’ in Stuart Hall et al. (eds), Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79, London: Hutchinson, 1980, p 19.

14. See Raymond Williams et al., ‘Television Supplement’, New Left Review 1(7), 1961,pp 45–46.

15. For E P Thompson's definition of the New Left, see his ‘The New Left’, The New Reasoner 9, Summer 1959, pp 1–17. For G D H Cole, see the essay cited above. It would be interesting to analyse with some care the relation between Isaac Deutscher's interventions in British Marxism and the Anderson/Nairn project.

16. For Labourism, see Tom Nairn, ‘The Nature of the Labour Party’, in Perry Anderson and Robin Blackburn (eds), Towards Socialism, London: Fontana, 1965, p 159.

17. In particular it was not infected by what Crosland had called the ‘anti-American neurosis’ of the British left and helps explains the first New Left's critical focus on communications and mass culture. See Anthony Crosland, The Future of Socialism, London: Jonathan Cape, 1956, p 142.

18. See Tom Nairn, ‘Labour Imperialism’, New Left Review 32, 1965, pp 3–16, for a lucid analysis of neo-imperialism of the Vietnam war.

19. Nairn, ‘The Nature of the Labour Party’, p 196.

20. Perry Anderson, ‘Problems of Socialist Strategy’, in Anderson and Blackburn, Towards Socialism, p 246.

21. Nairn, ‘The Nature of the Labour Party’, p 214.

22. See Kirkpatrick Sale's SDS, New York: Random House, 1973, pp 84–85. Sale here reminds us that the university's capacity for radical analysis and organisation was under debate in the early days of the US New Left.

23. A full account of the break between the left and the British working class during the sixties is to be found in Barry Hindess, The Decline of Working-Class Politics, London: Paladin, 1971.

24. Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex had appeared in English translation in 1953; Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique in 1963.

25. Another appeal for anti-colonialism to be applied to Western radicalism is to be found in Stuart Hall's ‘The New Revolutionaries’, in Eagleton and Wicker, From Culture to Revolution, pp 217–219.

26. For a good account of post-structuralist anti-statism see Tim Brennan's Wars of Position: Cultural Politics of Left and Right, New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.

27. Stuart Hall, ‘Culture, the Media and the ‘Ideological Effect’, in James Curran, Michael Gurevitch and Janet Woollacott (eds), Mass Communication and Society, London: Sage, 1979.

28. Alan Shuttleworth, Two Working Papers in Cultural Studies, Birmingham: University of Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 1967, p 33.

29. He did so in a stencilled paper as well as in his ‘The New Revolutionaries’, in Eagleton and Wicker, From Culture to Revolution.

30. Stuart Hall, ‘The Determinations of Newsphotographs’, Working Papers in Cultural Studies 3, 1972, pp 53–89.

31. See Hunter's ‘The History of Theory’, Critical Inquiry 32(4), 2006, pp 78–112.