“Marxism, without Guarantees”: What I Learned from Stuart Hall

With the death of Stuart Hall we have lost the last of the British, or British-based, Left-wing intellectuals who began their work in the decade or so after the end of the Second World War. The roll of honor of the departed is long, and it includes, in addition to Hall, Raymond Williams, Edward Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton, Victor Kiernan, Raphael Samuel, Ralph Miliband, John Westergaard, Roy Pascal, Geoffrey de Ste Croix, George Rudé, Isaac Deutscher, Norman Geras, Chris Harman, and Tony Cliff (and these are only those I’m aware of). Of the succeeding generation, Terry Eagleton, David Harvey, Sheila Rowbotham, Perry Anderson, and Robin Blackburn endure in immensely productive ways, but we’ve also lost Ernesto Laclau, Peter Gowan, Gerry Cohen, and Andrew Glyn from this later generation. The prospects for a continued and vibrant British Marxism, combining intellectual activity with practice, are certainly not sunny on the surface, but there is still before us the formidable, albeit posthumous, instance of Stuart Hall—an always-bracing presence, at all times combining a gravity in his analyses with an un -stoppable willingness to be up for the next battle, even as he was engaged in what seemed like two or three other concurrent battles as he was speaking or writing (and these included poor health, barely mentioned by him, involving long-term dialysis and an eventual kidney transplant, in the two decades before his death).

I was at Birmingham from 1972 to 1977 doing my PhD in philosophy and theology. On most days it was possible to see this stylish black man (the only one on the faculty as I recall)—usually wearing an open-necked shirt and blue jeans, with a sports jacket reserved for cooler days—walk across the main quad between the Muirhead Tower and the faculty common room.¹ Hall was director of the Centre of Contemporary Cultural Studies, whose remit was a source of puzzlement for those of us chained intellectually, and mostly unknowingly so, to the seminar tables of more traditional departments. “What do they do there?” some of us asked, a question to which even our fellow PhD students in English, naïvely presumed by the questioner to be interested in “culture,” seemed not to have an answer. In time this questioner got a vague sense that “they” worked on topics usually ignored by the academic mainstream, using a distinctive pedagogy involving team-based research and working groups.

Hall had a reputation, which transcended departmental boundaries, as a rivetingly charismatic lecturer, and he did give the occasional open lecture, a couple of which I attended. But at that point in my intellectual formation, with a first degree in analytical philosophy, plodding now with a zig-zagging passion through a narrowly focused dissertation on the ontological argument for the existence of God using the semantics of modal logic, I had no real reference points for engaging with the intellectual agendas associated with Hall, even though I was in complete agreement with the essence of his politics. Toward the end of my time at Birmingham, as a respite from reading (ah, that endless bibliography!) Quine, Saul Kripke, David Lewis, Richard Montague, Alvin Plantinga, Richmond Thomason, Nino B. Cocchiarella, Richard Routley (who changed his name to Richard Sylvan when he abandoned quantified modal logic for environmental philosophy), Jaakko Hintikka, Stig Kanger (a pioneering modal logician in his 50s from Helsinki who gave a talk to our philosophy department; he was a very dignified grandfatherly figure with shoulder-length gray hair, dressed in what looked like a pale blue spacesuit with boots of the same color, a veritable prefiguration of Gary Numen and Devo in the post-punk movement of a decade later—did they know that a great Finnish logician was their precursor in fashion?), and others, I read with absolute fascination Adorno’s Minima Moralia and Martin Jay’s intellectual history of the early Frankfurt School at the instigation of Rex Ambler, the much-loved but at times bewilderingly eclectic Quaker theologian in Birmingham’s theology department.

A...