H. Stuart Hughes was an American historian who helped introduce Gramsci to readers of European thought. His 1958 book Consciousness and Society treated Gramsci as a major Marxist thinker. Hughes admired his range but questioned whether his view of freedom could fit with Communist rule. This account follows Hughes's training, his book and its early reception through 1967.[1][2]
Early life and intellectual formation
Hughes was born in New York in 1916. He earned a degree at Amherst in 1937 and a history doctorate at Harvard in 1940. In his own account of his training, he credited Crane Brinton and Charles H. Taylor with teaching him how to study the history of ideas.[1][2]
That field asked how people formed views of their world and acted on them. Hughes wanted to take beliefs seriously without treating them as causes that stood apart from social life. In the opening of Consciousness and Society, he rejected the idea that large forces could explain change on their own. People still had to choose and act. Their choices gave historians something to explain.[2]
His research also grew through discussion. He thanked students in his Stanford seminar for helping him test unfinished arguments. A Guggenheim fellowship supported research in 1955. Work at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences gave him time to write in 1957. These were named stages in the making of his book.[2]
Ideas and political aims
Hughes studied a problem raised by Marx and later social thinkers. How much room did people have to choose if their lives were shaped by economic forces, social habits or drives they did not understand? He argued that historians needed to study conscious thought as part of the answer. Beliefs could help explain changes that a record of repeated behavior could not.[2]
This question shaped his reading of Gramsci . Hughes praised Gramsci for giving thought and culture a serious place within Marxism. He thought Gramsci had tried to join a promise of human freedom to the demands of Communist leadership. Hughes saw a deep tension between those aims.[2]
His concern centered on hegemony, the leadership a class wins through consent as well as power. Hughes thought Gramsci's language of shared beliefs made Communist rule seem freer than it would be. Yet he also argued that Gramsci's interest in culture and human choice gave his work a character quite different from Lenin's. His reading combined respect for Gramsci's thought with doubt about its political results.[2]
Hughes's own public activity included work for peace and nuclear disarmament. Those commitments help explain his place in American political debate. His account of Gramsci must still be read through the arguments he made in the book.[1][2]
Career and activities
Hughes taught briefly at Brown before entering military service in 1941. During the war, he held research and administrative roles in the Office of Strategic Services , or OSS. He later worked at the State Department. He joined Stanford in 1952 after teaching at Harvard. In August 1956, Harvard announced his return as a full professor, to begin on July 1, 1957.[1][3]
In 1962, Hughes ran for the United States Senate in Massachusetts as an independent. Peace and nuclear disarmament were central to his campaign. He became co-chair of the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, known as SANE, in 1963. He became its chair in 1967.[1]
Major works
Consciousness and Society [2] examined European thought from 1890 to 1930. Hughes followed writers who challenged the belief that social life could be understood through fixed scientific laws. His subjects included Freud, Weber, Croce and Sorel. He asked how they understood human choice, social order and the place of ideas in history.[2]
Gramsci appeared in a section on changes within Marxism. Hughes linked his interest in culture to debates about the limits of an account built around economics. He also stressed Gramsci's respect for Lenin. Readers met both Gramsci's effort to renew Marxism and Hughes's concern about the party power tied to that effort.[2]
The book offered a way to learn about Gramsci beyond the short English selections. A reader could meet him while studying a much wider debate about thought and society.[2]
Influence and criticism
Gwyn A. Williams opened his 1960 essay on Gramsci's hegemony with Hughes's judgment. He praised Hughes's study and agreed with parts of its account. He then examined hegemony in much greater detail, including the work of building leadership before taking state power. This was a direct response to Hughes's reading, with its own judgments about Gramsci's meaning.[4]
Hughes therefore belongs among the early readers who helped set the terms of the English-language debate. His role was that of a historian and critic. His book gave another writer a claim to examine and a reading to develop.[2][4]