Hoggart’s diagnosis of cultural decline drew on the Leavisite and Scrutiny tradition.

Evidence

Diagnosis is a useful term here—the word “healthy” is telling—since it reminds us of what this conclusion owed to, and how much it was influenced by, the cultural critique offered by the Leavises and Scrutiny : the embattled position adopted in F. R. Leavis’s own cultural writing; the narrative of decline at the heart of Q. D. Leavis’s influential Fiction and the Reading Public (1932); the strenuous program of cultural resistance that informed Scrutiny ’s educational project and manifestos like Mass Civilization and Minority Culture (Leavis 1930); and the critique of the debased language of advertising offered by Denys Thompson and others. The book also shared much common ground with the pessimistic critique of mass culture offered by conservative critics and writers, many of them American (quotations from Tocqueville, Arnold, Benda, Lawrence, Eliot, Yeats, etc. lend authority to the narrative of cultural decline). — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 146

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships