ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the impact on British Cultural Studies of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. It discusses the use of Gramsci's theories within the early work of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies and the subsequent diffusion of these ideas into broader intellectual currents. Policing the Crisis coined the term 'authoritarian populism' as a way of framing the political situation of the mid-1970s, and looks at how Stuart Hall developed some of these ideas as tools of political intervention, largely in the magazine Marxism Today. By the mid-1970s, Williams had begun to make this debt to Gramsci explicit, and the clearest expression of a more theorized awareness of the relationship between culture, power and struggle comes in his chapter on hegemony in Marxism and Literature. The Foucault Effect is unequivocal in making the argument that a Gramscian approach was insufficient to the task of understanding the relations of culture and power.
