The 1956 Suez and Hungary crises triggered the New Left’s coalescence
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. The same issues were also breaking culturally. We took away the novelist Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, new things that were happening in cinema in the British documentary movement—like Lindsay Anderson’s essay in Sight and Sound. 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. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 778
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: Connects to broader histories of how Cold War events fractured existing left alignments and created space for new formations.
Related
- The 1956 Suez and Hungary crises catalyzed Britain’s New Left movement (similarity 0.94)
- The British New Left emerged in 1956 amid the disintegration of Marxism (similarity 0.85)
- 1956’s twin crises drove postcolonials to deconstruct Marxism’s Eurocentrism. (similarity 0.82)
- The 1956 New Left emerged from a third-position third-world student milieu (similarity 0.78)
Broader Connections
- Stuart Hall regarded 1956’s Suez and Hungary crises as pivotal for him
#exemplifies(0.70) - The New Left expanded rather than collapsed the definition of culture and politics
#expands(0.55) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 160