Stuart Hall and political writing

How Stuart Hall redefined 'the political'

For many of us Stuart Hall's work has been the gold standard of political writing. Throughout his writing career he pioneered a different way of thinking about politics: in particular he brought about a complete transformation of the meaning of 'the political', so that it came to encompass a much wider field, in terms both of subjects considered and disciplines brought to bear. For this reason we are including in this issue some of the material we wrote to accompany a new edition of Stuart's political essays:¹ we think it usefully complements the arguments made in Deborah Grayson and Ben Little's article in this issue on conjunctural writing.

The essay form - Stuart's habitual way of writing - was ideally suited to his continuing concern with teasing out the complex contours of significant political moments and identifying what was shaping them. Time and again we see him trying to put his finger on the nature of the specific shifts and currents that have coalesced into the moment he is analysing. This is a clearly discernible characteristic of even his earliest essays, though his approach was later more fully developed and named as conjunctural analysis. This approach went alongside a more philosophical or abstract purpose, which nevertheless remained focused on real world concerns: he continually returned to the question of what politics is and where it happens. This abstract question is worked into the interstices of his concrete political analyses. It is all this, coupled with the wide range of elements he drew on, that is central to Stuart's uniqueness as a political theorist.

Redefining the political

Stuart's radically different approach to politics made him an acute critic of more orthodox commentators. Thus, in what was almost his first published intervention into British politics, written in 1957 in the aftermath of the Suez crisis, he opens with an understated provocation: 'The disorderly thrust of political events disturbs the symmetry of political analysis.'² This pithy declaration anticipates a number of lines of development in Stuart's later work. It draws our attention to the dysfunctions and displacements of political life; it indicates a concern for the necessary specificity of the domain of politics; it hints at the degree to which historical events outpace the theories which endeavour to explain them; and it prefigures what would later become crucial for him: the primacy of conjunctural analysis.

Other concerns in this essay that were to become familiar over the years included Stuart's criticism of 'the moral failure of the left' in the face of the crisis, and his insistence on the need to understand how political ideas come to be rooted in popular life. He identified in Conservatism after Suez 'an unstable blend' of the new and the old, 'conflicting tendencies … held together in a state of comparative disequilibrium'. Yet in this situation of 'comparative disequilibrium' he concluded that, none the less, 'the old neuroses govern'.

This can clearly also be read as an early incarnation of the spirit of political analysis embodied in Stuart's later explanation of Thatcherism in 'The great moving right show'.³ This too, famously, was driven by a sharp critique of the left; by an invocation of the political salience of the popular; and by an analysis of the ways in which the right constructs and mobilises popular anxieties to relocate them as common sense elements within its own hegemonic politics.

We can see here too the gradual emergence of a less rationalistic reading of politics, in which the 'subjects' addressed by political forces are seen as operating through an unsteady amalgam of psychic investments that conventional politics was unsuited to explain. Stuart was always critical of the reduction of politics to its technological and institutional practices and to its attendant discursive forms: the absolutism of opinion polls, for example, or of the more elaborate intellectual apparatus of psephology. He saw this as a political arrangement that sought to elevate in place of 'the people' an electoral calculus in which 'the electorate', as a...