Culture as everyday meaning-making broke decisively from the Arnoldian elite tradition.

Evidence

By “culture,” Hoggart meant how working-class people spoke and thought, what language and common assumptions about life they shared, in speech and action, what social attitudes informed their daily practice, what moral categories they deployed, even if only aphoristically, to make judgments about their own behavior and that of others—including, of course, how they brought all this to bear on what they read, saw, and sang. This view of culture as the practices of “making sense” was very far removed indeed from “culture” as the ideal court of judgment, whose touchstone was “the best that has been thought and said,” which animated the tradition from Arnold to Eliot and Leavis. The aim to make culture in the former sense a central and necessary part of the object of study, however fitfully achieved, was as defining a break as Williams’s third definition in The Long Revolution— culture as “ways of life”—and, moreover, despite significant differences, a break moving in a parallel direction . — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 150

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Defines the cultural-studies conception of culture as practices of making sense versus high-culture judgment.
• XREF: Parallels Raymond Williams’s third definition of culture as ‘ways of life’ in The Long Revolution.

Related

• Culture as making sense radically opposed the Arnold-to-Leavis canon tradition (similarity 0.93)
• Culture as shared meaning-making became democratized rather than elite civilization. (similarity 0.83)
• Culture operates as a constitutive force in politics and social change (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Culture as shared meaning-making became democratized rather than elite civilization. #corroborates (0.95) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 184