Stuart Hall's Relational Political Sociology: A Heuristic for Right-Wing Studies

Abstract

Since 2016, there has been a flood of research on the US right spanning disciplines and methodologies. This article theorizes a conceptual heuristic drawn from the writing of Stuart Hall to integrate this scholarship. To make the case for what I term Hall’s political sociology, I stage a dialogue with Arlie Hochschild, whose 2016 ethnography Strangers in Their Own Land has become a classic in the literature. While both Hall and Hochschild stress the importance of documenting the affective nature of political subjectivities, Hochschild’s investment in a politics of reconciliation prevents her from scaling analysis up to political elites, a move that would enable her to better contextualize her findings. Hall offers a model for such an approach, as he connects political subjectivities to acts of articulation; these acts to hegemonic projects; and the impact of such projects to the conjuncture. I stylize Hall’s four-step conceptual frame as a relational cycle because it reconnects the historicizing work of conjunctural analysis to the felt experience of individual subjectivities. Beyond outlining Hall’s political sociology, I illustrate how its use as a heuristic can integrate recent research on the US right. This scheme corrects for an analytic shortcoming driven by Hochschild’s politics of reconciliation, namely a view that political progress will emerge from small-scale, cross-partisan dialogue. Though Hall offers no easy answers to the political questions of our time, his relational political sociology provides a tool for interlacing the research we have, thus rendering the massive challenges of the moment visible in all their detail.