Staurt Hall was Inspired by Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy (1958, 1970), Raymond Williams' Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961), and E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (1963), the birth of British cultural studies is generally associated with the 1964 founding of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham by Hoggart and Stuart Hall. Over the next two decades, as education in England faced severe economic hardship, cultural studies came to be offered as an undergraduate degree in nine British polytechnics (and two universities, including Birmingham): it provided a useful umbrella for humanities departments under economic pressure to reorganize.
Generally speaking, the Birmingham school focused on the processes shaping post-war British society: the rise of mass communications, the increase in consumerism and resulting commodification of more domains of life, and racial and national forms of oppression. Some of this research is linked …show more content…
Hall contextualizes the Thatcher government in changes in the political character of postwar Britain. In the initial decades after WWII, Britain was headed toward European style social democracy. The post-war combination of big state and big capital was the result of a compromise between left and right: the right settled for the welfare state and Keynesian economic policy while the left agreed to work within the fundamental terms of capitalism. Responding to the massive upheavals of the late sixties and seventies; world economic recession, inability to finance a welfare state and sustain capital accumulation and profitability, industrial conflict, strikes, and violent racism against immigrants, Thatcherism reversed the previous consensus, reconstructed the social order, and "changed the currency of political thought and argument such that free meant, free market".(Hall 1988,
Generally speaking, the Birmingham school focused on the processes shaping post-war British society: the rise of mass communications, the increase in consumerism and resulting commodification of more domains of life, and racial and national forms of oppression. Some of this research is linked …show more content…
Hall contextualizes the Thatcher government in changes in the political character of postwar Britain. In the initial decades after WWII, Britain was headed toward European style social democracy. The post-war combination of big state and big capital was the result of a compromise between left and right: the right settled for the welfare state and Keynesian economic policy while the left agreed to work within the fundamental terms of capitalism. Responding to the massive upheavals of the late sixties and seventies; world economic recession, inability to finance a welfare state and sustain capital accumulation and profitability, industrial conflict, strikes, and violent racism against immigrants, Thatcherism reversed the previous consensus, reconstructed the social order, and "changed the currency of political thought and argument such that free meant, free market".(Hall 1988,