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Halls career as a critic and activist spanned the second half of the twentieth century and the years of the twentyfirst up until his death in.
During that time,

he set out a perspective on the world which synthesised Marxism with the insights gained from European structuralism and other sociological perspectives.
All of this made him one of the most important figures in the New Left currents that emerged from disillusionment with the Soviet inspired orthodoxy that repelled so many people after the invasion of Hungary in.


This volume of his Essential Essays sets out the positions he became committed as one of the founders of the Cultural Studies school of criticism.
At the heart of his concerns was the need to establish the role that culture played in determining the lived realities of people of people at the point of time the conjunction which we all inhabit.
The inherited version of Marxism presented the view that culture was determined by the economic forces that determined the historical mode of production.
But this predicted the polarisation of society into two great camps based on their economic interests capitalists on one hand and the working class on the other.
Class struggle would produce cultures appropriate to these class interests, with the working class emerging as a revolutionary force committed to the overthrow of capitalism.


That this wasnt the path that history took was accounted for by the concept of false consciousness, with capitalists enjoying success in imprinting on the thinking of the working class an ideology which bound them to consumerist promises of an economy which would provide all the wealth and security they needed.


The essays in this volume set out the reasoning which led Hall and his associates to break with this model of the base and superstructure of the social system.
Beginning with the work of Richard Hoggart in thes, the innovators of Cultural Studies saw culture as operating in a more nuanced way, providing perspectives in which working class people could accept the basic premises of capitalist common sense about the world and the way it worked, but still nurture within their own communities outlooks and values which pitched them into episodic bouts of conflict and tension with the system.
It became possible to see culture as a field of struggle which mobilised the values of community and solidarity against market consumerism at key points and opened up the possibility of a break with bourgeois common sense.


Could this point of a break be arrived at by means of a conscious left wing political strategy The work of Raymond Williams crops up here, but even more so the perspectives of the French structuralist school that was being led by Louis Althusser.
Althusser wanted to understand human culture in the way the theorists of linguistics understood language as a system in which meaning condensed out of an array of activities and attached itself to particular facts.
This was an inherently complex process with outcomes arising not for any single reasons, but as consequence of the overdetermination arising from the operation of many different factors.
The events of May, for example, and in particular the Frances eventual pacification with the return of de Gaulle from his temporary exile, were overdetermined by ideologies rooted in the educational system, the Catholic church, the economism of the trade union movement, the way politics was discussed in the mass media, etc, etc.


Cultural Studies worked with this view though registering scepticism about the extent to which overdetermination had its roots in structures rather than social action and it influenced the ways in which Hall and his colleagues understood the relative autonomy of each ideological sphere.
This was of greatest importance in understanding how the various departments of the state could enter into conflict with the market when it came to developing commitments to providing healthcare, education, and other welfare policies on a public interest basis.
For a period of a few decades the ideologues of state action could convince themselves that capitalism had been transcended and what now existed was a benign system of managed corporativism.


But Hall continued to ponder Marxs understanding of the economy, in the last instance, being the determinant of superstructural culture.
The essay “Rethinking the Base and Superstructure Metaphor is key to understanding his approach, His reading of the mature works of Marxs corpus encouraged him to think of capitalism as being not so much a pure mode of production, but an agglomeration of social forces with sufficient flexibility within the overall form of the system as to allow for a switch from the extraction of absolute surplus value, as in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to relative surplus value, marked in England by the factory legislation in the mids.
“We can see in this shift as providing the baseline of solutions to the contradictions to which capitalism, as a fully established mode of production, is progressively exposed.
“

“If we then attempt to think all that is involved politically, socially, ideologically, in terms of the state, of politics, of the reproduction of skills, the degree of labour and the application of science as a productive force as a consequence of the uneven development of this second moment in the unfolding of capitalist accumulation.
then we begin to see how Capital provides the foundation for the development of a Marxist theory of the superstructures within the framework of determination in the last instance without falling back into the identitycorrespondence position in The German Ideology.


The second half of the set of essays hinge around the question of racism and the role it plays in “societies structured in dominance.
The themes already set out in the discussion about the foundations of Cultural Studies are called into play here, requiring us to understand racism, not as a single phenomenon structured by an essential antagonism between people of different racial groups, but as something cultural specific to definite societies at particular points in their history.
The extent to which it gives the appearance of being a unified force derives from the common feature of the exploitation of nonEuropean people in the service of Western capitalist interests.
This means that the racism of the slave trade, the plantation, the colonial period, and of migrant labour seems to be covered by an overarching imperative, which Hall sets out to show needs unpicking to understand how it acquires its force at specific moments in time.
“Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance is the standout essay on this issue,

The final part of this volume deals with the media in contemporary society, and elaborates on Halls understanding on how it needs to be read to appreciate its role in the formation of culture.
Maintaining his perspective on relative autonomy and the need for specific, concrete analysis of issues, he disputes the view that it functions as an allpowerful force able to corrupt the thinking of the masses, and shows how in its populist form it works with concepts and viewpoints that mirror those already held by working class people, but edging them towards conclusions that fit in with broader, promarket, proestablished authority perspectives.
The final two essays a preface to theedition of Policing the Crisis, and the iconic Great Moving Right Show, demonstrate the power of Halls analysis to set out what has come to be the enduring statements on critical political phenomena as they emerged in the UK during the phase of the crisis of the welfare state and the transition into Thatcherism.

no more base/superstrucure!!! necessary reading, . . A brilliant collection of essays, Stuart Hall is required reading for anyone awake amp aware, From his arrival in Britain in thes and involvement in the New Left, to founding the field of cultural studies and examining race and identity in thes and earlys, Stuart Hall has been central to shaping many of the cultural and political debates of our time.
Essential Essaysa landmark twovolume setbrings together Stuart Hall's most influential and foundational works, Spanning the whole of his career, these volumes reflect the breadth and depth of his intellectual and political projects while demonstrating their continued vitality and importance.


Volume: Foundations of Cultural Studies focuses on the first half of Hall's career, when he wrestled with questions of culture, class, representation, and politics.
This volume's standout essays include his fielddefining “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies" the prescient “The Great Moving Right Show,” which first identified the emergent mode of authoritarian populism in British politics and “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse,” one of his most influential pieces of media criticism.
As a whole, Volume provides a panoramic view of Hall's fundamental contributions to cultural studies, .