The founding members of the British Cultural Studies (BCS) in trying to shape the content and the direction of cultural studies found themselves dealing with '...post-war British society, ... entering a period of change and development whose terms were set by the terms of the post-war 'settlement. ... The 'settlement' - defined by the revival of capitalist production, the founding of the welfare state and 'the cold war' appeared to bring economic, political and cultural forces into new kinds of relation, into a new equilibrium (Hall, 1990: 16).

These founders of the BCS concerned themselves with questions such as, (i) what qualitative breaks with the past were necessary? (ii) Was Britain still a capitalist civilisation or a post-capitalist one? (iii) Was the emergence of a welfare state representation of a fundamental or merely a superficial reordering of society? The more one reads these people's writing the more one becomes aware that they were dealing with cultural studies as it pertained to the post-war era. "The depression and the war appeared to have established certain critical breaks with earlier development" (Hall, 1990: 16). As they tried to grapple with the post-war issues the more questions emerged. These issues centred around the constitutive part of the agenda of the early 'New Left', which many of the founders or contributors to the BCS were associated. They also defined the objectives, agenda and space in which Cultural Studies (CS) emerged. Therefore, from its inception, CS addressed awkward but relevant issues about contemporary post-war society and culture.

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