ABSTRACT
It was at this time that Stuart Hall himself left the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies to work at the Open University, which in the 1980s became the key site for innovation and consolidation in the field. Cultural populism was exemplified by some of the key cultural studies works of the period. At this stage of the argument, it is important to grasp the extent to which the old left continued to dominate radical political discourse in the Britain of the 1980s. In the United States, the left was similarly marginalised, although the scale and complexity of American politics cannot be easily compared to the United Kingdom’s highly centralised political system, in which the leader of the parliamentary majority can effectively govern the entire country by diktat. Despite the relative political paralysis of the left, the mid-late 1980s did see some very important developments in radical theory.
