ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a discussion on cultural politics and austerity, both as economic rationality and as an ideological construct that permeates various narratives under the latest crisis in capitalism and neo-liberal philosophy. Raymond Williams' concept of 'cultural materialism' is a useful conceptual framework to study the processes of cultural politics. Despite any abstractions, cultural politics, as empirical reality and the manner in which cultural politics proceeds, can be properly understood only in terms of conjectural analysis of which history and tradition bears down upon the present; cultural politics and relations of power therein represents the dialectics of social and economic development. The response across Europe, the US and Canada, to varying degrees, was for governments to introduce austerity policies in order to control the crisis, to reduce government debt and control deficit. The data provided by the Pew Research Center partly demonstrate responses by middle-class voters to austerity economics.
