Cultural Studies pioneer Stuart Hall predicted the rise of “authoritarian populism”
“What we have to explain is a move toward ‘authoritarian populism’—an exceptional form of the capitalist state—which, unlike classical fascism, has retained most of the formal representative institutions in place, and which at the same time has been able to construct around itself an active popular consent.”
— Stuart Hall, from “The Great Moving Right Show” (1979)
With authoritarianism on the rise at home and abroad, the work of the late British cultural theorist Stuart Hall, one of the founding figures of cultural studies, has never seemed more prescient or urgent.
Almost 50 years ago, Hall coined the term “authoritarian populism” to describe how the Right whipped up irrational “moral panics” around Black crime, migrant invasions, radical left-wing subversion, and the liberalization of sex and gender norms to sell an especially vicious brand of predatory corporate capitalism and smash the bipartisan political order.
Hall’s groundbreaking insights into the political, cultural, and economic conditions that gave rise to this new authoritarianism in the 1980s — and the central role the corporate/centrist/neoliberal consensus played in laying the ground for it — provide a blueprint for understanding and resisting the resurgence of authoritarianism and right-wing populism today.
Below, you’ll find a special selection of MEF videos that showcase Hall’s political and theoretical interventions at different stages in his career. Taken together, these videos provide timely insights into what Hall called “the terrifying internal fear of living with difference.” They also help clarify why Hall believed difference should be acknowledged and respected without being essentialized, and why he so fiercely rejected the embrace of absolutist political thinking on the left in response to authoritarian thinking on the right.
We want to call special attention to Through the Prism of an Intellectual Life, a recently discovered, newly restored video of one of Hall’s most famous and spellbinding lectures, based on one of his most influential essays. In the talk, Hall speaks with dazzling precision about the responsibilities of intellectuals and educators in the face of undemocratic structures of power. He also lays out in the clearest possible terms a theoretical framework for dissecting and resisting authoritarian thinking without lapsing into reductive ideological simplifications of one’s own. The result is an essential classroom resource that’s as relevant today as ever.
The selection also includes The Last Interview: Stuart Hall on the Politics of Cultural Studies, MEF Executive Director Sut Jhally’s final conversation with Hall shortly before his death in 2014. In the interview, Hall — who would have turned 93 last week — summarizes and extends the trailblazing analysis of politics and culture he offered in Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law & Order, the 1978 book widely regarded as one of the most important volumes ever published on race relations and the rise of authoritarianism in Britain. Browse these and other Hall titles below!
