Introduction

This chapter introduces Jack Lindsay, writer, publisher and activist, whose work has been seen as forerunner to the development of British Cultural Studies. Lindsay’s view of culture as fundamental to human nature, being and productivity was innovative and interdisciplinary as was his notion of the fundamental interconnectedness of individual beings—with others, their society, the natural world and within themselves. Lindsay saw writing as a medium of this interconnectedness and so as a crucial subject of study, primarily for the ways it engaged the individual. The chapter also addresses the question of Lindsay’s obscurity and considers the suggestion that his work may be seen as a ‘vanishing mediator’, essential to the formation of late twentieth-century interdisciplinary fields but no longer visible to them.