Few names suggest the achievement of British cultural studies more than that of the Marxist intellectual Stuart Hall. Through his involvement in the founding of New Left Review, his direction of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), his leadership of the fight against Thatcherism, and his education of an entire generation of cultural-studies practitioners, Hall has emerged as an iconoclastic proponent of the political potential of culture. Since the beginning of his career in the mid 1950s, Hall has rejected the traditional Marxist idea that the base (the economic structure of society) determines the superstructure (civil society and the state). As did the revisionist Marxist Antonio Gramsci, one of his main intellectual inspirations, Hall argues that the legal system, the arts, religion, and other features of the superstructure also play important roles in the creation and maintenance of power. Only by relinquishing a reassuring faith in the...