The first volume of the landmark two-volume collection of Stuart Hall's most important and influential essays, Foundations of Cultural Studies focuses on the first half of Hall's career, when he wrestled with questions of culture, class, representation, and politics.

From his arrival in Britain in the 1950s and involvement in the New Left, to founding the field of cultural studies and examining race and identity in the 1990s and early 2000s, Stuart Hall has been central to shaping many of the cultural and political debates of our time. Essential Essays—a landmark two-volume set—brings together Stuart Hall's most influential and foundational works. Spanning the whole of his career, these volumes reflect the breadth and depth of his intellectual and political projects while demonstrating their continued vitality and importance.

Volume 1: Foundations of Cultural Studies focuses on the first half of Hall's career, when he wrestled with questions of culture, class, representation, and politics. This volume's stand-out essays include his field-defining “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies"; the prescient “The Great Moving Right Show,” which first identified the emergent mode of authoritarian populism in British politics; and “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse,” one of his most influential pieces of media criticism. As a whole, Volume 1 provides a panoramic view of Hall's fundamental contributions to cultural studies.

"Anyone whose work is informed, 'in the last instance,' by Cultural Studies will find much that is helpfully familiar in it as well as new connections, new applications, new ways of '[penetrating] the disorderly surface of things to another level of understanding,' as Hall says, invoking Marx, in the epilogue. This seems especially urgent as the ascendancy of the far Right coincides with the wholesale neoliberalization of the humanities, as Hall predicted in his 'Theoretical Legacies' lecture. It is obviously not a question of 'going back' to Hall for a truer or more 'authentic' form of Cultural Studies than that in practice today. But there is much in his legacy that illuminates the dynamics of the present, and much to put into dialogue with contemporary scholarship and practice. Morley's collection reminds us how important it is for genuine intellectual work to articulate competing and contradictory paradigms together, to work, as Hall did, from the points of contestation and conflict rather than seek solace in abstractions. This, finally, is the 'essential' in the essays assembled here." 

A Note on the Text  vii
Acknowledgments  ix
General Introduction: A Life in Essays  1
Part I. Cultural Studies: Culture, Class, and Theory
Introduction  27
1. Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, and the Cultural Turn [2007]  35
2. Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms [1980]  47
3. Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies [1992]  71
Part II. Theoretical and Methodological Principles: Class, Race and Articulation
4. The Hinterland of Science: Ideology and the Sociology of Knowledge [1977]  111
5. Rethinking the "Base and Superstructure" Metaphor [1977]  143
6. Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance [1980]  172
7. On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall by Larry Grossberg and Others [1986]  222
Part III. Media, Communications, Ideology, and Representation
8. Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse [originally 1973; republished 2007]  257
9. External Influences on Broadcasting: The External/Internal Dialectic in Broadcasting—Television's Double-Blind [1972]  277
10. Culture, the Media, and the "Ideological Effect" [1977]  298
Part IV. Political Formations: Power as Process
11. Notes on Deconstructing "the Popular" [1981]  347
12. Policing the Crisis: Preface to the 35th Anniversary Edition [2013] (with Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts)  362
13. The Great Moving Right Show [1979]  374
Index  393
Place of First Publication  411