Selected Political Writings: The Great Moving Right Show and Other Essays

Stuart Hall: Selected Writings

by Stuart Hall, Sally Davison (Editor), David Featherstone (Editor)

Selected Political Writings gathers Stuart Hall's best-known and most important essays that directly engage with political issues. Written between 1957 and 2011 and appearing in publications such as New Left Review and Marxism Today, these twenty essays span the whole of Hall's career, from his early involvement with the New Left, to his critique of Thatcherism, to his later focus on neoliberalism. Whether addressing economic decline and class struggle, the Cuban Missile Crisis, or the politics of empire, Hall's singular commentary and theorizations make this volume essential for anyone interested in the politics of the last sixty years.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Sociology, Politics, Cultural Studies, Philosophy, Class

376 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2017

About the author

Stuart Hall was an influential Jamaican-born British sociologist and cultural theorist. He was Professor of Sociology at the Open University, the founding editor of New Left Review, and Director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham.

Reviews

[Olly Kiernan]

Really engaging and enlightening analysis of United Kingdom politics 1957-2011 from the New Left perspective - the post-war consensus, the "Rivers of Blood" speech, the Winter of Discontent, Thatcherism, the Falklands War, New Labour, the Cameron-Clegg coalition. Grappling with the difficult, bleak prospect of being a Soviet-critical leftist committed to Marxism in the imperial core at this time - endless disappointment with the Labour Party simultaneous to frustration with his fellow radicals' failure to keep up with the times. Almost too prescient for his own good.
Honestly, reading about each setback the British left faced over the decades, I wouldn't blame Stuart for just giving up and sticking to niche academia, or else just hitching his wagon to New Labour, but even up to 2011 the guy was tuned in and knew exactly what he was talking about - it's almost jarring to see this kind of Marxist/Gramscian analysis applied to David Cameron and Nick Clegg of all people, but maybe I just haven't been reading the right stuff.
That last essay makes me wish he was alive for just a decade longer - if only to see what he would have made of Jeremy Corbyn's leadership, Brexit, Boris Johnson, COVID-19 - I have no doubt he would have torn Keir Starmer to shreds. I expect to return to these essays as a baseline of analysis of British politics over this period.

[Tynan Brooks]

I should've chosen one of his other collections; this is very focused on the particular British political events happening at the time of each essay. I skimmed and skipped quite a few. The ones I read showed a great thinker, though, very attuned to the complexity of real history and politics, while still able to bring a clear perspective to them.