ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the most general ruses of the uncanniness, with especial respect to the recent work of Ian Hunter, who has attempted to find a way to account for these ruses without falling into a pure formalism on the one hand, or a naive historicism on the other. It begins with Hunter's expulsion of politics from the sphere of ethics or, as he himself would want to put it, 'fewer principles, and more ethics!' He derives this position from an analysis which considers traditional cultural criticism as 'absolutely groundless', and therefore useless for intervening in cultural policy. The chapter summarizes that cultural studies and policy are late variants of European Romanticism. Hunter would surely include most of the major instances of Cultural Studies, including the work of Raymond Williams or the Birmingham School. It is important to note the specificities of Hunter's materialism, which he distinguishes carefully from the 'materialism' of Marxism, and its associated sociological offshoots.
