Stuart Hall’s Legacy: Thatcherism, Cultural Studies and ‘the Battle for Socialist Ideas’ during the 1980s

Abstract

While few analyses of leading cultural thinkers and scholars, such as Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall, consider their roles as socialist public intellectuals, engaged in the on-the-ground debates around party and/or movement strategy and tactics for the Left, such involvement can contribute to making their work more influential as scholars and their work as scholars can contribute to making their political interventions more efficacious. This paper focuses on Stuart Hall’s role as a socialist public intellectual and his ‘Thatcherism’ thesis during the 1980s and argues that part of the latter’s success was not necessarily due to the veracity of its analysis so much as the position of the author and the production and distribution of the ideas.