The renowned cultural theorist Stuart Hall, who died on 10 February, was the first editor of nlr. Stepping down in 1962, he continued to play an outstanding role in the broader New Left for the rest of his life. Stuart made decisive contributions to cultural theory and interpretation, yet a political impulse—involving both a political challenge to dominant cultural patterns and a cultural challenge to hegemonic politics—pervades his work. His exemplary investigations came close to inventing a new field of study, ‘cultural studies’; in his vision, the new discipline was profoundly political in inspiration and radically interdisciplinary in character. Wrestling with his own identity as a West Indian-born anti-imperialist in Oxford, London and Birmingham, he evolved into his own style of Marxist. Author or co-author of a hundred texts, subject of scores of interviews, keynote speaker at many dozens of conferences, co-founder of three journals, he managed to be strikingly original and always distinctively himself. He bore nearly two decades of illness with amazing stoicism, exhibiting a tenacious hold on life and intense curiosity about the future; and helped in all this by his companion of nearly fifty years, the historian Catherine Hall.

Much of Stuart’s most original and influential work widened the scope of the political by taking account of the power relations of civil society. But he did not allow an inflation of micro-politics to obscure choices and institutions at the level of society as a whole. He returned time and again to the New Left as a macro-political project, albeit one that was exploratory and pluralist—an elusive ‘floating signifier’, as he might subsequently have described it—that evolved and found new expression in every subsequent decade. He was a drafter of the May Day Manifesto (1967–68), editor of Policing the Crisis (1978), analyst of ‘Thatcherism’ (1980), decrier of ‘New Labour’ (1998) and, most recently, scourge of neoliberalism and co-author of the Kilburn Manifesto (2013).

Stuart was born in Jamaica in 1932 to middle-class parents of mixed race (African, East Indian, Portuguese, Scottish and Jewish). His father worked as an accountant for the United Fruit Company. In a revealing interview with Kuan-Hsing Chen, Stuart explained the insidious character of the colonial racial order.footnote1 His parents wished to see their children win acceptance from white society and tried to forbid them from consorting with those darker than themselves. Prevented from bringing his friends home, Stuart met them elsewhere. He could not understand why his father tolerated the patronizing attitude of his English colleagues. When his sister fell in love with a Barbadian who was too black the parents refused to countenance the relationship, bringing on a psychological breakdown. These disturbing events led Stuart to reject the ethos of Jamaican society and to become a nationalist and anti-imperialist. He read pamphlets by Marx and Lenin but did not yet see himself as a Marxist. He was also aware of the island’s complex political culture; Orlando Patterson has described the highly articulate social world of the Caribbean islands as being comparable to the ancient Greek city states.

Stuart went to a good school—Jamaica College—with cricket lawns and an honours board that records his accomplishments, and in 1951, won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford. After gaining a degree in English, he started doctoral work on Henry James, but political commitments prevented him from completing it. He played a part in the movement of West Indian students in the uk. He later recollected a West Indian and African celebration dinner in 1954 to mark the French defeat in Vietnam. He also visited New York, where he confirmed his passion for the music of Miles Davis, though here too political considerations left their mark, and at one point the youthful activist’s contacts led to his being denied a us entry visa.

While still at Oxford, Stuart joined with Raphael Samuel, Charles Taylor and Gabriel Pearson in founding the Universities and Left Review, whose first issue appeared in 1957. Along with the New Reasoner, which was run by a group of expelled Communist Party oppositionists including Edward Thompson, Dorothy Thompson and John Saville, ulr was central to the formation of the New Left in Britain, and in 1960 the two journals merged to become New Left Review. Edward could have been editor, but declined because, after years of intense political engagement, he wanted time for research and writing. Stuart fitted the bill. He was a fluent and convincing public speaker, and his experience as hands-on editor at ulr made him the natural choice for the editorial post.

The New Left journals had spawned a movement and some three dozen New Left clubs sprang up in different parts of the country. This was the heyday of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (cnd) and the New Left played a role as a ginger group within it. The first Aldermaston March was held in 1958, and the New Left Clubs debated foreign affairs—‘positive neutralism’ was the phrase—as well as domestic politics. The London New Left Club met either at the Partisan coffee house in Carlisle Street, Soho, where the nlr was to be based, or, for larger meetings, at the Marquee Club in Oxford Street. The latter venue was booked for a Monday or Tuesday; on other nights it was one of the places where British jazz met visiting black American musicians playing the blues. Stuart would speak on issues of the day, as would a wide range of invited speakers, including Isaac Deutscher on ‘Hungary and the ussr’ and Paul Johnson on the overthrow of the French Fourth Republic.

The British New Left was defined by its repudiation of Stalinism, and the Soviet invasion of Hungary, combined with a rejection of the Cold War and of the Anglo-French invasion of Suez, in 1956. Neither the ulr nor the early nlr presented themselves as Marxist journals, though they were fascinated by Marx’s youthful writings with their theme of alienation. Charles Taylor came across a French edition of Marx’s Paris Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and wrote a pamphlet explaining its central ideas. Stuart and Raphael Samuel used a Marxisant vocabulary as they analysed ‘consumer capitalism’ or ‘contemporary capitalism’. The latter terms conveyed that, on the one hand, they were not dealing with classical ‘robber baron’ capitalism—this was, self-consciously, a new left for a new period and a new culture—but that on the other, Keynesianism and the welfare state had perhaps tamed capitalism a bit but not suppressed its basic urges. The contrast here was with Labour ‘revisionists’ like Anthony Crosland who believed that Britain had entered a post-capitalist phase and that, as a Labour policy document famously put it, ‘British industry is serving the nation well.’