Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

3 Culturalism
In this chapter I will consider the work produced by Richard Hoggart, Raymond
Williams, E.P. Thompson, and Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel in the late 1950s and
early 1960s. This body of work, despite certain differences between its authors, constitutes
the founding texts of culturalism. As Hall (1978) was later to observe, ‘Within
cultural studies in Britain, “culturalism” has been the most vigorous, indigenous
strand’ (19). The chapter will end with a brief discussion of the institutionalization of
culturalism at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.
Both Hoggart and Williams develop positions in response to Leavisism. As we noted
in Chapter 2, the Leavisites opened up in Britain an educational space for the study of
popular culture. Hoggart and Williams occupy this space in ways that challenge many
of the basic assumptions of Leavisism, whilst also sharing some of these assumptions.
It is this contradictory mixture – looking back to the ‘culture and civilization’ tradition,
whilst at the same time moving forward to culturalism and the foundations of the
cultural studies approach to popular culture – which has led The Uses of Literacy, Culture
and Society and The Long Revolution to be called both texts of the ‘break’ and examples
of ‘left-Leavisism’ (Hall, 1996a).
Thompson, on the other hand, would describe his work, then and always, as
Marxist. The term ‘culturalism’ was coined to describe his work, and the work of
Hoggart and Williams, by one of the former directors of the Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies, Richard Johnson (1979). Johnson uses the term to indicate the presence
of a body of theoretical concerns connecting the work of the three theorists. Each,
in his different way, breaks with key aspects of the tradition he inherits. Hoggart and
Williams break with Leavisism; Thompson breaks with mechanistic and economistic
versions of Marxism. What unites them is an approach which insists that by analysing
the culture of a society – the textual forms and documented practices of a culture – it
is possible to reconstitute the patterned behaviour and constellations of ideas shared
by the men and women who produce and consume the texts and practices of that society.
It is a perspective that stresses ‘human agency’, the active production of culture,
rather than its passive consumption. Although not usually included in accounts of the
formation of culturalism out of left-Leavisism, Hall and Whannel’s The Popular Arts is
included here because of its classic left-Leavisite focus on popular culture. Taken
together as a body of work, the contributions of Hoggart, Williams, Thompson, and
Hall and Whannel, clearly mark the emergence of what is now known as the cultural