Culturalism, E.P. Thompson and the polemic in British Cultural Studies

Abstract

The recent publishing of Stuart Hall’s 1983 lectures on the theoretical history of British Cultural Studies (BCS) provides an opportunity to reconsider the efficacy of ‘culturalism’ and ‘structuralism’ as useful signifiers representing the complicated legacies of their associated scholars. This essay focuses on the construction of culturalism as a characterization of the work of British historian E.P. Thompson, a scholar who rejected the label ‘without reservation.’ Specifically, the essay contextualizes Thompson’s ‘culturalist’ perspective in relation to his ‘polemical’ mode of argument and socialist humanist politics within the New Left. The essay argues that cultural studies scholars would politically and intellectually profit from reimagining culturalism in relation to Thompson’s contentious polemical mode and his passionate, if not divisive conviction that socialist scholarship needed to inform grassroots political struggles.