It is difficult today to grasp the impact the publication of Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy (1957) had on the intellectual world of the late 1950s. What is clear, however, is that the book itself and the knowledge movement of which it formed an initial component have had an enormous effect on the way many scholars understand the world of human social relations. Moreover, the development of that knowledge movement, cultural studies, must now be recognized as a fundamental challenge to the large-scale structures defining and organizing what counts as legitimate, authoritative knowledge in the modern world.