Stuart Hall, Development Theory, and Thatcher's Britain

Abstract

This article traces the influence of theories of Third World underdevelopment on Stuart Hall's understanding of the nature of historical transitions. I show Hall's notion of “articulation,” central to his social theory, is indebted to ideas about development originating in the global South, rather than to the thinking of “Western Marxists.” By arguing that Antonio Gramsci was a theorist of “articulation,” Hall read Gramsci as a thinker comparable to development theorists he was engaging with in the same period. This had important implications, I suggest, for Hall's “Gramscian” analyses of British politics in the 1980s. Specifically, I show that by describing Thatcherism as a form of “regressive modernization,” Hall adopted the idiom of several theories of economic development to argue that the uneven development of capitalist relations of production is the key to understanding how advanced forms of capitalist accumulation can accommodate seemingly archaic and reactionary social relations and institutions.