Richard Hoggart (1918-2014), a poor child who went onto become a university professor, was the epitome of a successful scholarship student. The trajectory of this “exemplary counter-example” sheds light on the mechanisms of social reproduction when they prove inoperative and the distance that can be traveled from one’s native milieu.
The questions posed both by Richard Hoggart’s success and his explanations of it are of great interest to sociologists who study the working class and popular culture. For the sociologist, Hoggart’s story remains as relevant today as ever. It already belonged to a distant past when he set out to tell it; for a French audience, his native culture is, moreover, a foreign one. But it is precisely this twofold distance—in time as well as in space—that allows us to better understand contemporary French culture by comparing it to another typified cultural form in a way that calls attention to their specificities. Such a comparison makes it possible to grasp the varieties of invariants that can be found in different historical and social contexts, including, for instance, the legacy of cultural handicaps, educational inequalities, and obstacles to social mobility. The concepts and the patterns that Hoggart’s case have helped to conceptualize [1] (“autonomy” vs. “domination,” “alternation” and/or “ambivalence”) can be applied to current developments in working-class culture and to transformations resulting from the changing composition of working-class populations. Recent immigrant cultures, which tend to be highly diverse, are both more autonomous (due to language and, at times, to religion) and more dominated. The rural exodus and urbanization have led to ghettoization. As with Hoggart’s own native culture, the culture of the lowest strata of the new working classes is a local culture. This is also what makes it ambivalent: the very means they use to protect themselves also shut them off from the surrounding world.
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