Stuart Hall: An Exemplary Socialist Public Intellectual?

Abstract

Most assessments of the influence of scholars and public intellectuals focus on their ideas, which are based upon an implicit assumption that their widespread circulation are a result of the veracity and strength of the ideas themselves, rather than the processes of production and distribution, including the intellectual’s own contribution to the ideas’ popularity by attending conferences and public rallies, writing for periodicals, and so on. This concise article offers an assessment of the late Stuart Hall’s role as a socialist public intellectual by connecting the person, scholar and public intellectual to the organisations, institutions and publications through which his contributions to both cultural studies and left politics were produced and distributed. This article includes an emphasis on Hall’s ‘Thatcherism’ thesis and his public interventions via the periodical, Marxism Today, during the 1980s.