ABSTRACT

The two cultures conception of knowledge, the sciences and humanities, with the social sciences poised precariously in between, was at its apogee during the two decades following the end of war in 1945. Its dominance was never total, however, and from within the superdisciplines a number of approaches were developed that contested the prevailing model in terms of theoretical frameworks, or methodological practices, or even proprietary subject matters, and sometimes all three. The domain of General Systems Theory may be specified as those general aspects, correspondences and isomorphisms or rigorous analogies that are common to systems in general. British life and Britain's place in the world in the 1950s, then, defines the short-term, synchronic facet of the emergence of cultural studies. The geopolitics of the mid-1950s come together with this 150-year trajectory of British criticism in the formation of the first New Left and the emergence of cultural studies.