{"title":"Paul Johnson and the Cultural Logic of the British Hard Right","authors":"","doi":"10.1007/s12115-023-00947-5","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<h3>Abstract</h3> <p>Within the British conservative movement, the hard right is identifiable and significant. The hard right tends to believe that Britain’s cultural institutions, such as the BBC, have an embedded anti-conservative bias. For them, the Corporation represents everything that is wrong with the ‘liberal metropolitan elite’ that, they believe, controls key institutions. This article explores the contribution to this narrative made by the popular historian and combative political commentator Paul Johnson, a prominent public figure in the UK and USA for many decades. Johnson’s potent melding of social, political, and economic critiques of the Corporation represented a significant deepening of an ‘anti-BBC mood’ on the British right. This article contextualises the cultural logic explicit in Johnson’s critique of the BBC and the wider ‘liberal establishment’. It does so by contrasting Johnson with the influential cultural theorist Richard Hoggart, who shared Johnson’s view that, during the latter part of the twentieth century, the original mission of the BBC was severely eroded. Examining Johnson’s thought provides important insights into the character, strengths, and weaknesses of the hard right view. What emerges is a profound disjunction between the certainty and forcefulness with which hard right narratives are put forward and their deep contestability.</p>","PeriodicalId":47267,"journal":{"name":"Society","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.4000,"publicationDate":"2024-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Society","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-023-00947-5","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"SOCIAL SCIENCES, INTERDISCIPLINARY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Within the British conservative movement, the hard right is identifiable and significant. The hard right tends to believe that Britain’s cultural institutions, such as the BBC, have an embedded anti-conservative bias. For them, the Corporation represents everything that is wrong with the ‘liberal metropolitan elite’ that, they believe, controls key institutions. This article explores the contribution to this narrative made by the popular historian and combative political commentator Paul Johnson, a prominent public figure in the UK and USA for many decades. Johnson’s potent melding of social, political, and economic critiques of the Corporation represented a significant deepening of an ‘anti-BBC mood’ on the British right. This article contextualises the cultural logic explicit in Johnson’s critique of the BBC and the wider ‘liberal establishment’. It does so by contrasting Johnson with the influential cultural theorist Richard Hoggart, who shared Johnson’s view that, during the latter part of the twentieth century, the original mission of the BBC was severely eroded. Examining Johnson’s thought provides important insights into the character, strengths, and weaknesses of the hard right view. What emerges is a profound disjunction between the certainty and forcefulness with which hard right narratives are put forward and their deep contestability.
期刊介绍：
Founded in 1962, Society enjoys a wide reputation as a journal that publishes the latest scholarship on the central questions of contemporary society. It produces six issues a year offering new ideas and quality research in the social sciences and humanities in a clear, accessible style.
Society sees itself as occupying the vital center in intellectual and political debate. Put negatively, this means the journal is opposed to all forms of dogmatism, absolutism, ideological uniformity, and facile relativism. More positively, it seeks to champion genuine diversity of opinion and a recognition of the complexity of the world''s issues.
Society includes full-length research articles, commentaries, discussion pieces, and book reviews which critically examine work conducted in the social sciences as well as the humanities. The journal is of interest to scholars and researchers who work in these broadly-based fields of enquiry and those who conduct research in neighboring intellectual domains. Society is also of interest to non-specialists who are keen to understand the latest developments in such subjects as sociology, history, political science, social anthropology, philosophy, economics, and psychology.
The journal’s interdisciplinary approach is reflected in the variety of esteemed thinkers who have contributed to Society since its inception. Contributors have included Simone de Beauvoir, Robert K Merton, James Q. Wilson, Margaret Mead, Abraham Maslow, Richard Hoggart, William Julius Wilson, Arlie Hochschild, Alvin Gouldner, Orlando Patterson, Katherine S. Newman, Patrick Moynihan, Claude Levi-Strauss, Hans Morgenthau, David Riesman, Amitai Etzioni and many other eminent thought leaders.
The success of the journal rests on attracting authors who combine originality of thought and lucidity of expression. In that spirit, Society is keen to publish both established and new authors who have something significant to say about the important issues of our time.
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