He was born in Leeds and educated at Cockburn High School and the University of Leeds. He served with the Royal Artillery during World War II, and was demobilised as a Staff Captain. He was appointed Staff Tutor at the University of Hull from 1946 to 1959 and Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Leicester from 1959 to 1962.

The Uses of Literacy [1] (1957) is Hoggart's most cited work. Partly autobiography, it was interpreted as lamenting the loss of an authentic popular culture and as denouncing the imposition of a mass culture by the culture industries.

Hoggart was an expert witness at the Lady Chatterley trial in 1960, and his argument that it was an essentially moral and "puritan" work, which merely repeated words he had heard on a building site while on his way to the court, is sometimes viewed as having had a decisive influence on the outcome of the trial.

While Professor of English at Birmingham University (1962—1973), he founded the institution's Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in 1964 and was its director until 1973. Hoggart was Assistant Director-General of UNESCO (1971—1975) and finally Warden of Goldsmiths, University of London (1976—1984), after which he retired from formal academic life. The 'Main Building' at Goldsmiths has now been re-named the 'Richard Hoggart Building' in tribute to his contributions to the college.

Hoggart was a member of numerous public bodies and committees, including the Albermarle Committee on Youth Services (1958—1960); the Pilkington Committee on Broadcasting (1960—1962); the Arts Council of Great Britain (1976—1981); and the Statesman and Nation Publishing Company Ltd (1977—1981). He was also Chairman of the Advisory Council for Adult and Continuing Education (1977—1983), and the Broadcasting Research Unit (1981—1991), as well as a Governor of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre (1962—1988).

In recent works like The Way We Live Now (1995), regretting the decline in moral authority which he holds religion once provided, he has attacked contemporary education for its emphasis on the 'vocational' and 'cultural relativism' for its tendency to concentrate on the popular and meretricious.

He has two sons, the political journalist Simon Hoggart and the television critic Paul Hoggart, as well as a daughter Nicola. In The Chatterley Affair, a 2006 dramatisation of the 1960 trial made for the digital television channel BBC Four, he was played by actor David Tennant.