The first volume of the landmark two-volume collection of Stuart Hall's most important and influential essays, Foundations of Cultural Studies focuses on the first half of Hall's career, when he wrestled with questions of culture, class, representation, and politics.

A Note on the Text  vii Acknowledgments  ix General Introduction: A Life in Essays  1 Part I. Cultural Studies: Culture, Class, and Theory Introduction  27 1. Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, and the Cultural Turn [2007]  35 2. Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms [1980]  47 3. Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies [1992]  71 Part II. Theoretical and Methodological Principles: Class, Race and Articulation 4. The Hinterland of Science: Ideology and the Sociology of Knowledge [1977]  111 5. Rethinking the "Base and Superstructure" Metaphor [1977]  143 6. Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance [1980]  172 7. On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall by Larry Grossberg and Others [1986]  222 Part III. Media, Communications, Ideology, and Representation 8. Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse [originally 1973; republished 2007]  257 9. External Influences on Broadcasting: The External/Internal Dialectic in Broadcasting—Television's Double-Blind [1972]  277 10. Culture, the Media, and the "Ideological Effect" [1977]  298 Part IV. Political Formations: Power as Process 11. Notes on Deconstructing "the Popular" [1981]  347 12. Policing the Crisis: Preface to the 35th Anniversary Edition [2013] (with Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts)  362 13. The Great Moving Right Show [1979]  374 Index  393 Place of First Publication  411

"Anyone whose work is informed, 'in the last instance,' by Cultural Studies will find much that is helpfully familiar in it as well as new connections, new applications, new ways of '[penetrating] the disorderly surface of things to another level of understanding,' as Hall says, invoking Marx, in the epilogue. This seems especially urgent as the ascendancy of the far Right coincides with the wholesale neoliberalization of the humanities, as Hall predicted in his 'Theoretical Legacies' lecture. It is obviously not a question of 'going back' to Hall for a truer or more 'authentic' form of Cultural Studies than that in practice today. But there is much in his legacy that illuminates the dynamics of the present, and much to put into dialogue with contemporary scholarship and practice. Morley's collection reminds us how important it is for genuine intellectual work to articulate competing and contradictory paradigms together, to work, as Hall did, from the points of contestation and conflict rather than seek solace in abstractions. This, finally, is the 'essential' in the essays assembled here." 

“The late Stuart Hall was more than an intellectual giant of postwar Britain. He was the great illuminator, whose far-reaching insights into how the world is constructed show us why cultural studies is not about the manners learned from the masters, but a way of examining and understanding social reality as made by the people themselves.”