Selected Political Writings

"Hall's writings make an extremely important contribution not only in our understanding of the past and the cultural, political, sociological, and theoretical formations that Hall analyzed, but as documents that provide us with powerful political and theoretical tools to understand our present and change our future." - Hazel Carby

"Stuart Hall was one of the great political intellectuals of our time—learned, perspicacious, provocative, and wise. He was also a master essayist. This splendid selection, spanning more than fifty years, is a feast." - Wendy Brown

"It’s hard to imagine a better time for the arrival of this book. Political uncertainty and reactionary posturing are a defining feature of recent months. The care and thoughtfulness carried in its pages are very welcome, the sense of context and sharpness of insight feel invaluable. . . . Hall’s writing was always political, but here we find him exercising his prodigious analytical skills on explictly political questions and issues. The result is something to behold. A book that scans across time telling stories that are likely to matter whenever the book is read." - David Beer, Hong Kong Review of Books

"Hall's metier was to tease out the competing histories, the contradictory political, economic, and social forces condensed within a particular historical moment, an excavation of ideology he called 'conjunctural analysis.' . . . [H]is work is all too timely, for the haphazard project of neoliberalism, justified retroactively by nonsensical appeals to the 'free market,' is as advanced as the decades-long economic decline it magics away with bubbles and rhetoric (GDP balloons; personal wealth stagnates)." - Michael Robbins, Bookforum

"Stuart Hall’s pen is sharp and well-informed. One does not have to agree with everything he writes to acknowledge this truth. This collection of Hall’s political writings is simultaneously a history, a series of lessons, and a preview of our current situation. It serves as a delightful indication of why he was so widely read when he was alive." - Ron Jacobs, Counterpunch

"Given the current examples of national leadership bordering on the bizarre it is arguably time for us all to attempt a deeper analysis of the political, and hopeful, earn the politicians we deserve.  In this Stuart Hall can be recommended as a guide.  Although his study is specific to British politics, given the similarities of politics in the western world, his analysis remains relevant." - Clare W. Brook, Queensland Reviewers Collective

"Hall’s work has become especially resonant as Britain has voted for a narrower identity and a more isolationist attitude to the rest of the world.... There is a generosity and literary imagination in his writing—a recognition that humans are complex, contradictory creatures shaped by, among other things, what they believe, where they live, how they shop, and who they sleep with." - Jessica Loudis, The New Republic

"Hall wrote these essays primarily for contemporaries also seeking to make sense of their particular political contexts, but they now stand as useful and powerful texts of leftist political thought for scholars, activists and students.... Hall’s compelling and analytically rigorous theses are eloquent, precise and exciting to read." - Max Shock, Political Studies Review

"[Hall] is able to provide a reading that, going behind the ‘facts’, is able to show what is taking place behind all our backs.... The grasp of detail together with underlying shifts and patterns; and the ability to see all this almost as it was happening (and throw in jocular asides). Most of the articles in Political Writings were responses to what was happening then, not written with the historian’s benefit of distance and hindsight." - Tony Jefferson, Theory, Culture & Society

"The editors of this collection have presciently selected a wide spectrum of Hall’s writings to show that while history may not be repeating itself, many issues we presently encounter have been previously reflected upon by Hall.... The struggle between the old and the new underlies Hall’s essays in this collection, and reading through them it becomes again apparent how our present echoes in the past so admirably analysed by Hall." - Ali Meghji, Cultural Studies

"Selected Political Writings is both a timely an enjoyable read. On the page, and for those of us who were lucky enough to hear him, as a speaker too, Stuart Hall brought the analysis of politics alive in a way which is sorely missed in 2017. These essays provide a sharpness of intellect and warm embrace of analysis that are a positive joy to read, new and afresh or but read in a new times, good and bad, that even Stuart Hall could never have foretold. " - Mark Perryman, Open Democracy

“Selected Political Writings is a ‘greatest hits’ of political writing from one of postwar Britain’s most consistently interesting, innovative, and perceptive analysts.” - Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, H-Ideas, H-Net Reviews

"An exemplary model of what rigorous, engaged public intellectual work can look like. . . . The bulk of these essays revolve around Hall’s attempts to complicate his readers’ understanding of what constitutes effective political action." - Gilbert B. Rodman, Journal of Communication Inquiry

"Selected Political Writings highlights Hall’s legacy and the analytical tools he provided for us." - Evan Smith, Australian Journal of Politics and History

"I have also narrated the effort it took for me to access his work to illustrate the importance of the Selected Writings now being released by Duke University Press. It is an event of profound historical significance that a new generation will be able to begin its political and theoretical education with systematic access to Hall’s writing.  . . . Selected Political Writings presents his now canonical analysis of the rise of the right and the strategic impasses of the left beginning in the late 1970s." - Asad Haider, The Point

"It was one of Hall’s unique gifts to offer analysis of the moment as it unfolded before our eyes. I am sure I am not alone in having found his talks exhilarating in ways I could never quite understand, given that the news he relayed with such energy was almost unremittingly dire. Hall offered his readings as interpretation and self-commentary, tracing his own intellectual path." - Jacqueline Rose, New York Review of Books