Culture as making sense radically opposed the Arnold-to-Leavis canon 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. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 150

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the break between cultural-studies ‘culture as making sense’ and the Arnoldian evaluative tradition.
• XREF: Echoes Williams’s third definition of culture as ‘ways of life’ in The Long Revolution, which Hall explicitly parallels.