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Cultural studies and cultural theory

from its recognition ‘not only of the necessity for abstraction as
the instrument of thought through which “real relations” are
appropriated, but also of the presence...of a continuous and
complex movement between different levels of abstraction’ (Hall,
1980, p. 67). Whatever the merits of Hall’s wider argument, it
seems to us that he clearly misconstrued the situation insofar as
his stress fell on the supposedly atheoretical nature of British
culturalism. Indeed, Hall had himself observed of Williams’ The
Long Revolution, one of the seminal ‘culturalist’ texts, that: ‘It
attempted to graft on to an idiom and mode of discourse
irredeemably particular, empirical and moral in emphasis, its
own . . . kind of “theorizing” . . . The difficult, somewhat abstract
quality of the writing... can largely be ascribed to its status as
a “text of the break”’ (Hall, 1980a, p. 19).
Moreover, Hall seriously underestimated the properly ‘theo-
retical’ content of the culturalist tradition as it had evolved before
Williams. If the mode of exposition of Leavisite literary criticism
(perhaps the single most important instance of British cultural-
ist thought) was indeed irredeemably particular, its intellectual
content—as, for example, in the debate about industrialisation
and cultural decline or that about the ‘dissociation of sensibility’—
remained highly theoretical. There is nothing especially particular
nor even especially empirical about Leavis’ insistence that the
disintegration of the pre-industrial organic community was ‘the
most important fact of recent history’ (Leavis & Thompson, 1960,
p. 87). In truth, the various discourses about culture, which devel-
oped in Britain and Germany, France and Italy, Russia and the
United States, essentially as a series of sustained reflections on
the nature of cultural modernisation and, later, postmodernisa-
tion, have all been irretrievably ‘theoretical’ in nature, no matter
how apparently ‘empirical’ their particular reference points.
Hence, the invariable accompaniment of courses in cultural
studies by parallel courses in cultural theory. Hence, too, the
subject matter of this book.
Our point here is neither to celebrate nor to bemoan the sig-
nificance of cultural theory for cultural studies, but merely to note
its general significance. Almost everyone who worked in the
humanities and social sciences, whether in western Europe, the

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