Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain

History, the New Left, and the Origins of Cultural Studies

Browse Return to Previous Page       Related Subjects All Subjects Critical Theory/Marxism Cultural Studies

by Dennis Dworkin

Duke University Press

Due/Published May 1997, 336 pages, paper

ISBN 0822319144

Is there no book of history that tells the pre-history and development of cultural studies in all of its political context and some of its gossipy intrigue? There is now. OK, gossipy may be a bit overstated, but here we have the entire crew: Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill, Sheila Rowbotham, Rodney Hilton, Catherine Hall, and E.P. Thompson; and on to Perry Anderson, Barbara Taylor, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, and Dick Hebdidge. And their competing, merging, competing journals: The Reasoner, The New Reasoner, Universities and Left Review, New Left Review, and Past and Present. Dworkin does a great job of tracing this history to reflect a coherent intellectual tradition--including all of its significant debates over issues of culture and society, structure and agency, experience and ideology, and theory and practice--a tradition that represents an implicit and explicit theoretical effort to resolve the crisis of the postwar British Left.