LONDON LETTER
3<45
some effect. Richard Hoggart's
Uses of Literacy
and my own
Culture and Society
set off some of the cultural analysis in
Universities and Left Review,
but it is clear, looking back, that
this would have come through anyway. The fact of cultural
poverty is inescapable
in
contemporary Britain, and Hoggart had
very thoroughly documented it. But not all of us were willing to
describe this as "mass culture": this is still our main point of
difference from American radicals with whom otherwise we have
much in common. Hoggart himself seemed uncertain about this,
and it was easy to read his book as if the old working-class com–
munity feeling was the only alternative to the new classless "mass
culture." I disagreed, and argued mainly that certain ways of
thinking, including some radical thinking about "the masses," were
the sickness of a particular society, and that there was an alterna–
tive to these, not so much in the old working-class communities
which were in any case breaking up, but in the democratic
institutions which, however tarnished, still composed the British
labour movement. This argument is not yet resolved, though
Hoggart and I have learned from each other and are now rather
nearer a common position (one that had been assumed, quite
wrongly, much earlier when Richard Hoggart and Raymond
Williams got to be used like the name of a joint firm). The
tying-in of this new strand with the other developments noted
is also not complete, but some clarification came with the third
book,
Conviction,
a series of essays from a rather different range
of authors. Hoggart and I were put page by page with young
Labour Party sociologists and economists (Peter Townsend, Peter
Shore, Brian Abel-Smith), and on the whole it seemed like a
group, though the contributors had never met as such, and in
several cases had not met at all. Iris Murdoch's argument for a new
effort and emphasis in socialist theory came close to this mood,
and to some of the work in the two magazines. It began at last
to look as if a new Left existed or was on the edge of forming.
The
New Left Review
was launched in December 1959, and
its main job is to continue this search for new common ground,
as well as continuing and extending the particular lines of work
opened up. The encouraging thing
is
that it seems already to be
something more than a magazine. The
Universities and Left
