Histories of cultural populism

Histories of cultural populism Martin Ryle It is more than a decade since the perspectives of the Frankfurt School lost their dominance within left-wing cultural theory. In 1983 Fredric Jameson, while noting sardonically that poststructuralist celebrations of the consumer’s ‘desire’ simply ‘change the valences on the old descriptions of Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse’, registered his […]

A welfare culture?: Hoggart and Williams in the fifties

It is time to think again. An older phase of capitalism has ended. A received culture of class has declined with it, disarticulated by new forms of industrial organization, a transformed information economy, and changed patterns of consumption and recreation. The right has thematized these developments and prospered from them, as successive Conservative electoral victories […]

Timely Meditations

Timely Meditations Jonathan Ree Review Essay on Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989, 201pp. £25 hb, £7.95 pb, 0521353815 hb, o 521 36781 6 pb. It is now some years since Richard Rorty broke with American analytic philosophy, for reasons he spelt out in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature […]

1984 and all that

EDITORIAL 1984 and all that Recent re-organisation of the Editorial Collective’s working practices, aimed at a more equitable distribution of the work-load, has given rise to the new position of ‘issue editor’. Although basically administrative in character (the Collective as a whole still takes editorial decisions), this position is enlivened by carrying with it the […]

England, whose England?

Commentary England, whose England? Jon Beasley-Murray By their fear you shall know them. The USA responded to al-Qaedaʼs September 2001 attacks with a proliferation of flags reaffirming national pride and widespread support for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, confirmed by George W. Bushʼs 2004 re-election. Spain reacted to the Madrid train explosions of March […]