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THE SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION OF THE BRITISH NEW LEFT: “CULTURE” AND THE “MANAGERIAL SOCIETY,” C.1956–1962

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 February 2017

FREDDY FOKS
FREDDY FOKS*
Affiliation:
Trinity Hall, Cambridge E-mail: Wfpf2@cam.ac.uk
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Abstract

Castigated as theoretically naive by Perry Anderson, or praised as culturally sensitive by later writers, the political thought of the “first New Left” has often been understood in relation to F. R. Leavis's cultural criticism. This article seeks to reframe the writings of E. P. Thompson, Stuart Hall, Charles Taylor and Alasdair Macintyre from this period as interventions in a fundamentally sociological debate about the nature of capitalism in the managed economy of postwar Britain.

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 15 , Issue 3 , November 2018 , pp. 801 - 820
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

* The author wishes to thank Stefan Dickers for pointing out the existence of the Ruskin Papers at the Bishopsgate Institute and gratefully acknowledges the estate of Raphael Samuel for permission to quote from them. For comments on previous drafts of this article, thanks to Tom Arnold-Forster, Lise Butler, Alexandre Campsie, Katie Harper, Alexander Hutton, Peter Mandler, Tom Pye, Tim Rogan, David Runciman and the panelists at the Modern Intellectual History round table at the North American Conference on British Studies in 2014; to the two anonymous reviewers for Modern Intellectual History, many thanks for such collegial and constructive criticism. Writing this article was made possible by support from the Cambridge Arts and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Training Partnership.

References

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21 Ibid.

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45 Ruskin Papers, RS1/012 “THE NEW LEFT—A General Statement adopted by a joint meeting of the Editorial Boards of the New Reasoner and Universities & Left Review on Sunday April 26th 1959.”

46 Daniel Geary “Becoming International Again”; Tim Rogan, “Shifting Conceptions of Self and Society in the Formation of the Anglo-American New Left,” paper presented at the North American Conference on British Studies, Montreal, Nov. 2012.

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49 Ibid., 69; criticisms of Mills, 83 n. 3.

50 Ibid., 69.

51 Ruskin Papers, RS1/009, “The Fifth Issue ‘The Community’.”

52 For accounts that stress the “totality” of the New Left's cultural criticism see Kenny, The First New Left, 87; Dworkin Cultural Marxism, 4.

53 Ruskin Papers, RS1/009, “The Fifth Issue ‘The Community’.”

54 Ibid.

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57 Stuart Hall, “The Supply of Demand,” in Thompson, Out of Apathy, 56–97, at 75.

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59 Hoggart, Richard, The Uses of Literacy (London, 1957), 181Google Scholar.

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61 Quoted in Hilliard, English as a Vocation, 169.

62 Ibid., 63.

63 Quoted in Jackson, Ben, “Revisionism Reconsidered: ‘Property-Owning Democracy’ and Egalitarian Strategy in Post-war Britain,” Twentieth Century British History, 16/4 (2005), 416–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 424.

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68 Alasdair Macintyre, “Breaking the Chains of Reason,” in Thompson, Out of Apathy, 195–240, at 202, 197.

69 Norman Birnbaum, “Foreword” in Thompson, Out of Apathy, ix–xii, at x.

70 Ibid., x.

71 Ibid., xi.

72 Brick, Transcending Capitalism. For discussions of these themes within European Marxist traditions of political thought see van der Linden, Marcel, Western Marxism and the Soviet Union: A Survey of Critical Theories and Debates since 1917, trans. Bendien, Jurriaan (Leiden, 2007), 79–98Google Scholar.

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77 Alexander, “Power at the Base,” 266.

78 William Kornhauser wrote that the New Left harboured a view of the deformation of the consciousness of the masses which drew contradictory elements from both aristocratic critics of democratic change in the early nineteenth century and the populism of representative democracy's supporters in that it required “the social insulation of those segments of society that embody” the hoped-for values of the left. Kornhauser, William, The Politics of Mass Society (London, 1960), 22Google Scholar. On the construction of “tradition” in contemporary sociology see Lawrence, Jon, “Inventing the ‘Traditional Working Class’: A Re-analysis of Interview Notes from Young and Willmott's Family and Kinship in East London,” Historical Journal 59/2 (2016), 567–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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82 Ibid., 155.