Abstract
As Raymond Williams (1963 [1958]) insisted in his early classic Culture and Society, ‘The history of our idea of culture is a record of our reactions, in thought and feeling, to the changed conditions of our common life.’2 Williams went on later to formulate a paradigm of socio-cultural research that he named ‘cultural materialism’, which happens to be the chief analytical perspective deployed in the present book. Cultural materialism has been somewhat neglected since Williams’s death in 1988 despite its distinctive combination of critique and policy orientation. Such negligence is probably attributable largely to a diminution of criticism generally regarding capitalism and the broad historical drift in the direction of neoliberal hegemony.
A much earlier version of this chapter was delivered as a paper at the Raymond Williams and Robert Tressell in Hastings Conference, University of Brighton, 20 September 2011.
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Notes
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© 2016 Jim McGuigan
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McGuigan, J. (2016). Cultural Materialism. In: Neoliberal Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137466464_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137466464_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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