Leavis offered a non-mechanistic model of text-context relations that Marxism lacked.

Evidence

Leavis has an elitist and conservative view of education. Education is to train and refine the sensibility of the minority. This is a conservative social program which I am not interested in. But Leavis has the broadest understanding of culture. Interest in language because it takes you to the heart of the meaning of a culture … He addresses this complicated question which Marxism cannot unlock: how to understand the relation between the cultural text and its context in something other than a mechanistic way. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 963

Categorization

• DEFINE: Sets up the key methodological problem the field inherits: how text relates to context non-mechanistically — the very question hegemony and articulation theory answer.
• XREF: This is the same problem Gramscian articulation theory is built to solve; connects to later readings on culture as a site of struggle rather than a superstructural reflection.