The 1956 Suez and Hungary crises catalyzed Britain’s New Left movement

Evidence

A nascent “New Left” had emerged in Oxford as a distinct, informal student formation in the mid-1950s. Its subsequent coalescence with others into a movement was triggered by the events of 1956—the invasion of the Suez Canal by Britain, France, and Israel and the brutal Soviet response to the Hungarian Revolution and their effects in loosening the grip of the Cold War on political debate (Hall 1989). — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 158

In 1956, Alan Hall, myself, and two other friends, both of them painters, went away for a long summer vacation. Alan and I were going to write this book on British culture. We took away three chapters of Culture and Society, The Uses of Literacy, Crosland’s book The Future of Socialism, Strachey’s book After Imperialism; we took away Leavis, with whose work we’d had a long engagement. … This was the time when the Soviet Union marched on Hungary and the British invaded Suez. That was the end of that. The world turned. That was the formation, the moment of the New Left. We were into something else. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 778

The broader connections between Cultural Studies and the “first” New Left have been widely noted (Hall 1989). In particular, the book also had a major impact on the milieu which I inhabited in the period of its publication, principally because, for fortuitous reasons, these concerns—the changing nature of contemporary capitalism, the politics of postwar social change, and the constitutive nature of culture—together formed critical contested ground in the heady debates of the time. A nascent “New Left” had emerged in Oxford as a distinct, informal student formation in the mid-1950s. Its subsequent coalescence with others into a movement was triggered by the events of 1956—the invasion of the Suez Canal by Britain, France, and Israel and the brutal Soviet response to the Hungarian Revolution and their effects in loosening the grip of the Cold War on political debate (Hall 1989). … In this milieu, culture came to be seen not as an absolute value but as a constitutive dimension of all social practices and thus an active force in politics and social change: offering what (in the issue of the Labour Club journal, Clarion , which I edited and which was dominated by responses to The Uses of Literacy ) I called “quite different kinds of evidence” (Hall 1957: 3). — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 158

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s aim of understanding the intellectual/political context Hall’s essays respond to.
• QUESTION: The specific influence of Strachey’s After Imperialism on early New Left anti-imperialism is worth tracing — a pre-Said anti-colonial thread within the formation itself.
• DEFINE: Establishes the intellectual definition of ‘culture’ the early New Left adopted: constitutive dimension of all social practices, not absolute value.
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 158; Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2: Identity…, 778