Richard Hoggart and the way we live now

Jim McGuigan

pp. 75-87

in: Sue Owen (ed), Richard Hoggart and cultural studies, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008

Abstract

Richard Hoggart's The Way We Live Now was published in 1995, just short of 40 years after the publication of his "classic", The Uses of Literacy (1957). The later of these two books did not achieve anything like the success of the earlier book. Why? I ask this question because I regard The Way We Live Now as an important book in its own right as well as representing a continuity in the tradition of thought that tends to be called "cultural studies". Cultural studies, in the sense associated with Hoggart, is strongly marked by its formation as a feature of socialist intellectual life in Britain. Today, cultural studies is sometimes mistakenly treated as though it were an orthodox academic discipline with no necessarily socialist affiliation — sometimes quite the opposite, in fact¹ — instead of an interdisciplinary space for critical scholarship inspired by socialism and oppositional politics of a left-wing kind, which at its best eschews all orthodoxy, including the conventional wisdoms of neo-liberal capitalism and its social-democratic variant.

Cited authors

Hoggart Richard