Page 45 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

CULTURALISM

Left culturalism

Such essentially conservative “Britishness” had much less appeal,
however, to those of a more radical political persuasion. Distanced
from Leavisite English by its seemingly endemic political conservatism
and cultural élitism, the more independently-minded left-wing British
intellectuals of the 1950s began to forge their own “third way”, between
Leavisism on the one hand and Marxian socialism on the other, both
in practical politics and in cultural theory. The politics eventually
became that of the “New Left”; the theory what would be represented
in structuralist retrospect as “culturalism”, but is surely much more
accurately described as “left culturalism”. As a political movement
the early New Left was to prove fairly short-lived. Its more permanent
achievement, however, was the establishment in 1960 of the New
Left Review, almost certainly the central journal of radical thought in
Britain. The founding theoretical moment of left culturalism can be
located fairly precisely in the early writings of three “key” figures:
E.P. Thompson (1924–1993), Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams
(1921–1988). The first issue of the New Left Review included a
discussion between Williams and Hoggart on the theme of working
class culture; and both Thompson and Williams served on the journal’s
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editorial board.
Something of what would become “left culturalism” had first been
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explored in Thompson’s William Morris, a deeply appreciative study
of a writer hitherto marginal to the canonical wisdoms of both left
and right. If Thompson here reclaimed Morris for socialism, then he
simultaneously discovered in Morris much of the strength of the earlier
Romantic critique of utilitarianism. Thompson’s best-known work,
The Making of the English Working Class, would later quite explicitly
compare working-class resistance to utilitarianism with the tradition
of Romantic anti-utilitarianism. The “heroic culture” of the early
English working class, Thompson argued, had “nourished, for fifty
years, and with incomparable fortitude, the Liberty Tree”. “After
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William Blake,” he concludes, “no mind was at home in both cultures,
nor had the genius to interpret the two traditions to each other. In the
failure of the two traditions to come to a point of junction, something
was lost. How much we cannot be sure, for we are among the losers”. 49
Less directly political in intent, Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy
nonetheless marks the point at which post-Leavisite culturalism

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