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Genealogy of Cultural Studies 69

much strain; it requires no special skill other than that long established by
practice. After a time he can hardly be interested in what he does; the same
dozen or so jobs recur too often for that.” 43
Like Adorno, Hoggart thought of mass media as displacing traditional class
cultures, and hence weakening class consciousness. Regarding the “undis-
criminating looking-in, night after night” of the television audience, for ex-
ample, he declared:

Everything and almost anything is acceptable because, as important as the in-
trinsic interest of any programme itself, is the sense that you are one in the big
group watching the world (the world of events and personages) unroll before
you. These tendencies, I think, may assist the emergence of a cultural group al-
most as large as the sum of all other groups. But it would be a group only in the
sense that its members shared a passivity. 44

Hoggart described the emerging mass culture as a “soft mass-hedonism,” and
as a “hedonistic-group-individualism.” 45 An associated aspect of this new
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mass culture is the “temptation to live in a constant present” —what Innis re-
ferred to as present-mindedness.
Over his long career Hoggart authored or edited twenty-seven volumes.
The Uses of Literacy remains, however, by far his most influential. Once
Hoggart left the Centre, “the role of the theoretical pioneer passed over to
Raymond Williams.” 47

Raymond Williams
Raymond Williams (1921–1988)—a self-proclaimed “Welsh European” (as
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opposed to an English subject or person of British ancestry) —is the second,
and certainly the most renowned, of the three British founders of cultural
studies. According to Graham Murdock, “Raymond Williams . . . did more
than anyone else to map out the terrain that cultural studies would come to
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occupy.” For that reason, this chapter devotes the most space to Williams.
Like Hoggart, Williams was born to a wage-earning family. For many years,
he was a professor of drama at Cambridge. His ascent to the highest echelons
of international scholarship made him, in class-riven England, one of “the
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awkward squad.” Like Hoggart, Williams had been an adult educator and he
likewise believed that democracy requires that working class culture be au-
thenticated. Williams authored over twenty scholarly books, some seven nov-
els, several plays, and was editor or coeditor of numerous other volumes. 51
His first book, Culture and Society 1780–1950, published in 1958, is the sec-
ond chronologically of the three founding texts of British cultural studies.