Universities & Left Review

Out of the crises of Suez, on the one hand, and the Soviet invasion of Hungary on the other, a British New Left emerged. As Stuart Hall has written, one part of that was built around a “Communist humanism” represented by the New Reasoner created by John Saville and Edward and Dorothy Thompson. The other part of it – to which Hall belonged – saw itself as part of a more independent socialist tradition. Alongside Raphael Samuel, Gabriel Pearson, and Charles Taylor, Stuart Hall founded University and Left Review in 1957. Arguing in its first editorial that “the age of orthodoxies has, once again, been outstripped by historical events” it called for the tradition of socialist thinking to be more creative, to attend to “Literature, art, our feeling for the quality of life” while also facing up to “the damage which Stalinism and Welfare Capitalism have done to socialist values”. Universities and Left Review would later merge with the New Reasoner to become New Left Review in 1960.