In 1936 Hoggart won one of 47 Leeds University scholarships available to his generation of 8,000 18-year-olds. At university he met his future wife, Mary. He got a first in English but while doing an MA thesis was called up to fight in the British Army in the Second World War. He served in North Africa and Italy and eventually became a intelligence officer and by 1945 had reached the rank of staff captain.

In 1946 he became a tutor at the University of Hull. Later he lectured in English at the University of Leicester. In 1957 Hoggart published The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working Class Life (1957). In the book Hoggart described how the old, tightly-knit working-class culture of his boyhood was being destroyed by the influence of American culture and was “full of corrupt brightness, of improper appeals and moral evasions”. He added: “The hedonistic but passive barbarian who rides in a fifty-horse-power bus for threepence, to see a five-million dollar film for one-and-eightpence, is not simply a social oddity; he is a portent.”

Nicholas Wroe has argued: "The publication of The Uses of Literacy in 1957 propelled Richard Hoggart, then an extramural lecturer at the University of Hull, to the forefront of the changes that swept British culture from the sclerotic 1950s into the swinging 60s. The book was a groundbreaking study of working-class culture and a critical appraisal of the changes wrought by the commercial forces... Not only did it anticipate the opening-up of the cultural landscape, it also contributed to a critical and popular climate far more receptive to the subsequent explosion of books, films and art about working-class subjects by working-class artists."

David Lodge added: "Richard Hoggart was a hero of the liberal literary intelligentsia in the 1960s... Uses of Literacy is still in print and is still studied and read, but in those days it was a kind of Bible for first-generation university students and teachers who had been promoted by education from working-class and lower middle-class backgrounds into the professional middle class."

Hoggart was also involved in the campaign against the 1857 Obscene Publications Act. In 1959, the Labour Party MP, Roy Jenkins, introduced a private member's bill, that aimed to change the act. Jenkins persuaded Parliament to pass a new Obscene Publications Act. Before 1959 obscenity had been a common-law offence, as defined by the lord chief justice in 1868, extending to all works judged to "deprave and corrupt" those open to "such immoral influences". Under the new act works were to be considered in their entirety and could be defended in terms of their contribution to the public good; after 1959 those convicted of obscenity would also face limited (in contrast to previously unlimited) punishments of a fine or up to three years' imprisonment.

As a result of this legislation, Sir Allen Lane, the chairman of Penguin, agreed to publish an unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover, a novel that had been written by D.H. Lawrence in 1926. The initial print was 200,000 copies. Alerted to Penguin's intention to publish the novel, Sir Theobald Mathew, the director of public prosecutions, decided to prosecute the firm under the act of 1959. It was a move welcomed by Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, the Conservative government's attorney-general, who expressed the hope that "you get a conviction".

Mervyn Griffith-Jones was selected as the prosecuting counsel in the trial that was held at the Old Bailey between 20th October and 2nd November 1960. Michael Beloff has commented: "From the outset Griffith-Jones's hostility to the unexpurgated edition was apparent to those observing this high-profile test case of the new legislation." One observer, the journalist, Sybille Bedford, commented on a "voice quivering with thin-lipped scorn".

In his opening statement Griffith-Jones advised jury members that they must answer two questions: first, whether the novel, taken as a whole, was obscene in terms of section 2 of the new legislation ("to deprave and corrupt persons who are likely, having regard to all relevant circumstances, to read the matter contained in it") and, second, if this proved so, whether publication was still justified for the public good. "You may think that one of the ways in which you can test this book, and test it from the most liberal outlook, is to ask yourselves the question, when you have read it through, would you approve of your young sons, young daughters - because girls can read as well as boys - reading this book. Is it a book that you would have lying around in your own house? Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?" C. H. Rolph later argued that the question "had a visible - and risible - effect on the jury, and may well have been the first nail in the prosecution's coffin".

Richard Hoggart was one of several academics, including Raymond Williams, Graham Goulder Hough, Helen Gardner, Vivian de Sola Pinto, Kenneth Muir and Noel Annan, that appeared for the defence. Hoggart described the book as “highly virtuous if not puritanical”. They were accompanied by thirteen authors and journalists, including Rebecca West, E. M. Forster, Francis Williams, Walter Allen, Anne Scott-James, Dilys Powell, Cecil Day Lewis, Stephen Potter, Janet Adam Smith; John Henry Robertson Connell and Alastair Hetherington. Other defence witnesses included John Robinson, the Bishop of Woolwich.

In his closing speech, Mervyn Griffith-Jones questioned whether the opinions of university lecturers and writers were those of the "ordinary common men and women" who would read Penguin's cheap paperback edition, and reiterated that the novel contained depictions of sexual activity of the kind that could only be found "some way in the Charing Cross Road, the back streets of Paris and even Port Said". Griffith-Jones's efforts were in vain and on 2nd November, 1960, the jurors returned a verdict of not guilty, so opening the way for the legal distribution of novels that had previously been considered obscene. The book went on sale on 10th November, at 3s. 6d., and by the end of the first day the complete run of 200,000 copies had been sold. Within a year of its publication, this edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover had sold more than 2 million copies.

Hoggart moved to the University of Birmingham. In 1964 he established the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS). As the Guardian pointed out: "The foundations of cultural studies lay in an insistence on taking popular, low-status cultural forms seriously and tracing the interweaving threads of culture, power and politics. Its interdisciplinary perspectives drew on literary theory, linguistics and cultural anthropology in order to analyse subjects as diverse as youth sub-cultures, popular media and gendered and ethnic identities... Hall was always among the first to identify key questions of the age, and routinely sceptical about easy answers. A spellbinding orator and a teacher of enormous influence, he never indulged in academic point-scoring. Hall's political imagination combined vitality and subtlety; in the field of ideas he was tough, ready to combat positions he believed to be politically dangerous. Yet he was unfailingly courteous, generous towards students, activists, artists and visitors from across the globe, many of whom came to love him."

One of his first recruits was Stuart Hall and in 1968 Hall became director of the CCCS unit. Hall later argued that Britain experienced a real revolution in the 1960s: "Remember 1968, when everyone said that nothing changed, that nobody won state power. It’s true. The students didn’t win. But since then life has been profoundly transformed. Ideas of communitarianism, ideas of the collective, of feminism, of being gay, were all transformed by the impact of a revolution that did not succeed… So I don’t believe in judging the historical significance of events in terms of our usually faulty judgment of where they may end up.”

As The Daily Telegraph pointed out, Hoggart disagreed with Hall's Marxism: "Hoggart wrote in the 19th-century tradition of radical idealism, with its strong sense of moral values. He was a tireless enemy of independent broadcasting - and of the public schools, which he saw as perpetuating social privilege. Yet he was also essentially conservative in his dislike of change; hawkish in foreign affairs; and thoroughly elitist in his disdain for modern mass culture."

In 1969 Hoggart left university life to become assistant director-generalship at Unesco. According to John Ezard: "Hoggart puzzled friends by choosing Unesco. He travelled three times round the world but was appalled by what he regarded as the misconduct, bureaucracy, infighting and laziness he found within the organisation." Hoggart resigned in 1975 and wrote a critical book about the organization entitled, An Idea and Its Servants: UNESCO from Within (1978). Hoggart was also Warden of Goldsmiths College (1976-1984) and a member of the Arts Council of Great Britain.

Other books by Hoggart include The Critical Movement (1964), Speaking to Each Other (1970), Only Connect (1972), Speaking to Each Other (1973),An English Temper (1982), An Idea of Europe (1987), A Local Habitation: Life and Times 1918-40 (1989), An Imagined Life: Life and Times 1959-91 (1992), A Measured Life (1994), The Way We Live Now (1995), First and Last Things (2001), Everyday Language and Everyday Life (2003), Mass Media in a Mass Society (2005) and Promises to Keep (2006).

Richard Hoggart died on 14th April, 1914.