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Week 4 Discussion

 

As we’ve seen in previous readings, many of Hall’s older pieces speak to our current political situation. In “The great moving nowhere show” he discusses “structural interests preventing our achieving a more equitable distribution of wealth and life chances” (287). To what extent do these interests take the shape of economic policies vs cultural ideologies? In other words, in what ways is neoliberalism enacted through economics vs ideological state apparatuses, and how do those two intersect?

In “The new Conservatism and the old” Hall claims that “it is the tradition of reason which has suffered extreme pressure during the past decade, from the reactionary right and the reactionary left alike” (27). In today’s world, fake news and the “post-truth” environment are often associated with far-right politics, so I’m curious what Hall would consider a “reactionary left” movement? In what ways is this term applicable to a contemporary American context?

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