Page 41 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

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Contemporary Cultural Theory

What Leavis recognised, in a way that Arnold could not, was the
capacity for collective self-organisation latent within the intel-
lectual class. He failed, however, to confront its obvious likely
corollary: that the intelligentsia might prove as incapable of
Arnoldian ‘disinterestedness’ as the establishment itself. In that
failure is surely to be found the source of much of the bitterness
and rancour that so soured Leavis’ later years.

THE NEW LEFT: THOMPSON, HOGGART AND WILLIAMS

It should be clear that Leavis’ culturalism was both culturally
elitist and politically reactionary. As such, it was unlikely to
appeal to those of a more egalitarian political persuasion. During
the 1950s the more independently minded left-wing British
intellectuals began to forge their own ‘third way’ both in practi-
cal politics and in cultural theory, between Leavisism on the one
hand and Marxian socialism on the other. The politics eventually
became that of the ‘New Left’; the theory became what would be
represented in structuralist restrospect as ‘culturalism’, but is
surely more accurately described as ‘left culturalism’. The
founding theoretical moment of left culturalism can be located
fairly precisely in the early writings of three key figures:
E.P. Thompson (1924–93), Richard Hoggart and Raymond
Williams (1921–88).

E.P. Thompson and Richard Hoggart
Something of what would become ‘left culturalism’ had first been
explored in Thompson’s first book (Thompson, 1955), which
discovered in William 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 and Romantic anti-
utilitarianism. The ‘heroic culture’ of the early English working
class, he argued, had ‘nourished, for fifty years, and with in-
comparable fortitude, the Liberty Tree’. ‘After William Blake’, he
concludes, ‘no mind was at home in both cultures, nor had the

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