Page 86 - Cultural Theory

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••• Stuart Hall and the Birmingham School •••

between the 1880s and 1920s is regarded as foundational in establishing the paramount
institutions of normative coercion and milieu of civil society in twentieth century
Britain. The period is marked by increasing state instrumentality in ordering subjectiv-
ity through its involvement with schooling, health, the regulation of medical practice,
economic policy and cultural strategy. The function of the state became to engineer a
‘complex unity’ of hegemony through which subjective rights and freedom are auto-
matically and unquestionably identified with the National/Empire interest.
The rise of the representative-interventionist state derived from the emergence of a
new (Liberal and later the Labour Party) ‘reforming’ power bloc intent on winning con-
sent from a significant section of the working class. It was accomplished through a shift-
ing ‘war of positions’ on constitutional reform, welfare rights, redistributive taxation
and trade union rights. This manoeuvring itself reflected the declining profitability of
the British economy in relation to the new emerging economies of Germany and the
USA. However, Hall is careful to avoid any imputation that his thesis rests upon eco-
nomic reductionsm. Much of his work in the 70s can be interpreted as an attack on ‘vul-
gar Marxism’, i.e., the proposition that the economic substructure finally determines the
cultural and political superstructure. Gramsci’s concept of hegemony appealed to Hall
because it allowed for contradictions and a notion of mobile balance of power struggles
in normative regulation. Indeed, the shift towards the representative-interventionist
state is explained primarily in terms of a shifting war of manoeuvre between shifting cul-
tural and political alliances, compacts and concessions.
The erosion of the lassiez-faire state is investigated with recourse to several ‘fis-
sures’ arising from working class consciousness and resistance. The spread of trade
unionism from the so-called ‘aristocracy of labour’ to unskilled and semi-skilled
workers, the formation of the Labour Party and the readiness of the Liberal Party to
envisage alliances with Labour weakened the hegemony of laissez-faire conservatism.
By the end of the 1920s, the rudiments of a two party constitutionalism, founded
upon universal suffrage, the primary institutions of corporatist bargaining and a sys-
tem of public welfare provision were in place. The ideology of collectivism was ascen-
dant over market liberalism, and the elements of the new social order and the
consensus politics of social democracy were cemented.
The postwar settlement produced by the Attlee government in 1945 harnessed all of
these forces into a new ‘complex unity’ that formed the context of hegemonic struggle
from the Churchill government of the 50s to the emergence of Thatcherism and
Blairism. The 1945 Labour government founded the welfare state and, through nation-
alization, the principle of direct state ownership and control of key industries. They elab-
orated a system of corporatist control involving a partnership between business, labour
and the state. However, the durability of this complex unity was tested during the con-
sumer boom of the 1950s and 60s by Britain’s declining competitiveness viz-a-viz lead-
ing European economies and, of course, America and Japan. The progressive loss of
Empire and wage inflation at home compounded the problems. By the late 1960s, a pro-
found crisis in hegemony is evident in British cultural, political and economic life. Hall
regards it as the beginning of the drift towards the law and order society governed by an
authoritarian state which reaches fruition with Thatcherism.

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