The Function of Criticism: From The Spectator to Post-Structuralism

Terry Eagleton · 1984 · 133pp

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reading path: overview → analysis → narration

overview

Published one year after the massively successful Literary Theory: An Introduction, The Function of Criticism (1984) extends Eagleton's political analysis of literary studies into the history of criticism as a social institution. Drawing on Jurgen Habermas's concept of the bourgeois public sphere, Eagleton traces the evolution of criticism from its origins in the coffee houses and periodicals of early eighteenth-century England through its nineteenth-century professionalization to its contemporary fragmentation into specialized academic sub-disciplines.

The book is both a historical analysis and a political polemic. Eagleton argues that criticism was originally a form of political discourse — a way for the emerging bourgeoisie to debate public affairs and challenge aristocratic power. As criticism became professionalized within the university, it lost its political edge and its connection to a public readership. The book's final chapters diagnose post-structuralism as the terminal phase of this decline — a theory that celebrates the impossibility of the very public, rational discourse that criticism once embodied. The Function of Criticism remains one of Eagleton's most original and historically grounded works.

content map

Chapter 1: The Birth of Criticism

Eagleton opens with the eighteenth-century origins of modern criticism in the English coffee house and periodical press. The Tatler and the Spectator, edited by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, created a new form of public discourse — the critical essay — addressed to a non-specialist readership. This criticism was not narrowly literary; it discussed manners, morals, politics, and aesthetics as interconnected dimensions of public life.

Drawing on Habermas, Eagleton argues that this critical practice was integral to the formation of the bourgeois public sphere — a space of rational-critical debate between private individuals that mediated between civil society and the state. The critic was not a specialist but a "man of letters" who participated in the general conversation of society. This chapter establishes the normative ideal against which the rest of the book will measure criticism's subsequent decline.

Chapter 2: Criticism and the State

The nineteenth century saw criticism's gradual shift from the public sphere to the university. The reform of Oxford and Cambridge, the establishment of new universities, and the institutionalization of English literature as an academic discipline transformed criticism from a public practice into a professional specialization.

Eagleton examines Matthew Arnold as the transitional figure: Arnold believed that criticism should serve the state as a source of cultural authority and social cohesion. For Arnold, the critic was a disinterested arbiter of cultural value who could counteract the anarchy of commercial society and class conflict. This vision, Eagleton argues, was an ideology of the professional-managerial class — it presented the critic as above politics while in fact serving the state's need for ideological legitimation.

Chapter 3: Critics and Clerks

The early twentieth century saw the full professionalization of criticism. Eagleton examines T.S. Eliot and F.R. Leavis as exemplary figures. Eliot's criticism was inseparable from his conservative cultural politics — his defense of tradition, classicism, and Anglican orthodoxy. Leavis turned criticism into a form of moral discipline, a quasi-religious vocation that preserved authentic culture against the corrosive effects of mass civilization.

Eagleton's analysis is sharply critical but not dismissive. He acknowledges the seriousness and cultural ambition of the Leavisite project while arguing that its moralism was a substitute for genuine political analysis. The Leavisite critic claimed to speak for a universal human culture but in fact spoke for a particular class — the professional middle class — whose values were presented as universal norms.

Chapter 4: The Decline of the Critic

This chapter examines criticism in the post-war period, focusing on the emergence of theory and the fragmentation of the critical enterprise. Eagleton discusses the rise of the New Criticism in America, which turned criticism into a quasi-scientific technique of close reading, and the Scrutiny movement in Britain, which maintained a more moralistic but equally professionalized approach.

The central claim is that the institutionalization of criticism within the university has led to its depoliticization. Criticism no longer addresses a public readership; it speaks to other specialists in technical jargon. The critic has been transformed from a public intellectual into a professional academic. This decline is not primarily a failure of individual critics but a structural consequence of criticism's incorporation into the university system and its detachment from social movements and political struggles.

Chapter 5: Conclusion — Post-Structuralism as the End of Criticism

The final chapter offers a provocative reading of post-structuralism as the ultimate expression of criticism's crisis. Deconstruction, Eagleton argues, is the theory of a criticism that has lost faith in its own social function. Derrida's critique of logocentrism, his demonstration that meaning is endlessly deferred, and his resistance to political commitment reflect the situation of a critical practice that can no longer believe in its capacity to intervene in the world.

Eagleton is careful to acknowledge the theoretical sophistication of post-structuralism but insists that its political quietism is a political choice — and a conservative one. The chapter ends with a call to recover criticism's political function not by returning to some imagined golden age but by reconnecting criticism to movements for social transformation.

Reading Guide

This book is more historically focused than Literary Theory: An Introduction and benefits from some familiarity with English literary history from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Chapter 1 is essential for understanding Eagleton's Habermasian framework. Chapters 2-4 can be read as a continuous narrative of criticism's institutionalization. Chapter 5 is Eagleton's most sustained critique of post-structuralism and should be read in conjunction with the post-structuralism chapter in Literary Theory: An Introduction.

analysis

Book Context & Background

The Function of Criticism was published by Verso in 1984, at the height of the Thatcher era in Britain. It belongs to a series of works from the 1980s that examined the social role of intellectuals, including Russell Jacoby's The Last Intellectuals (1987) and Alvin Gouldner's The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class (1979). Eagleton's book is distinguished by its specific focus on literary criticism and its deployment of Habermas's concept of the public sphere.

The book was also a response to the growing influence of post-structuralism in Anglo-American literary studies. Eagleton's critique of deconstruction as politically evasive was controversial but widely discussed. The book contributed to the intensifying "theory wars" of the 1980s, in which the political implications of post-structuralism were fiercely debated.

About the Author

See the author profile in the companion entry for Literary Theory: An Introduction. In 1984, Eagleton was at the height of his influence as a Marxist critic and public intellectual. The Function of Criticism represents his most sustained engagement with the sociology of intellectual life.

Core Thesis & Argument

The book's central thesis is that criticism is a historically constituted social practice whose function has changed dramatically since its origins in the eighteenth century. Eagleton argues that criticism was originally a political discourse embedded in the bourgeois public sphere, that it became progressively professionalized and depoliticized through its incorporation into the university, and that post-structuralism represents the terminal crisis of a criticism that has lost all confidence in its social mission. The argument is guided by Habermas's normative ideal of the public sphere as a space of rational-critical debate, but Eagleton adds a Marxist emphasis on the class character of that public sphere and its eventual fragmentation.

Thematic Analysis

The Public Sphere: Drawing on Habermas, Eagleton traces the rise and fall of the bourgeois public sphere as the social space within which criticism originally operated. The coffee house and periodical press created a new kind of public discourse — rational, critical, and addressed to a general readership.

Professionalization and Depoliticization: The movement of criticism from the public sphere to the university is presented as a narrative of loss. Professionalization gave criticism institutional security but at the cost of its political edge and its connection to non-specialist readers.

Ideology and Disinterest: Eagleton repeatedly argues that the claim to "disinterestedness" — from Arnold to the New Criticism — is itself ideological. The critic who claims to be above politics is typically serving the interests of the established order.

Post-Structuralism as Symptom: The book's most controversial argument is that post-structuralism should be understood not as a radical critique but as a symptom of criticism's decline — a theory that justifies political quietism as philosophical necessity.

Argumentation & Evidence

Eagleton's method is historical and sociological. He draws on archival research into the periodical press, histories of the literary profession, and theoretical work by Habermas, Gouldner, and others. The evidence is primarily drawn from English literary history, with some attention to American developments. The book's argumentative strategy combines historical narrative with theoretical analysis: each historical phase is described and then interpreted through Eagleton's Marxist-Habermasian framework.

The book is more empirically grounded than many of Eagleton's later works, which tend toward more general cultural commentary. However, critics have noted that the historical narrative is highly selective — Eagleton focuses on figures and moments that support his thesis of decline while ignoring counterexamples.

Strengths

Original synthesis of Habermas and Marxism: Eagleton's use of public sphere theory to analyze the history of criticism is genuinely original and opens up new questions for research.
Historically grounded argument: Unlike much literary theory, which proceeds at a high level of abstraction, Eagleton's book is grounded in specific historical institutions and practices.
Provocative thesis about post-structuralism: The argument that deconstruction is not a radical politics but a symptom of political defeat is provocative and forces a reevaluation of post-structuralism's political claims.
Normative clarity: Eagleton's commitment to a criticism that would serve social transformation gives the book a clear evaluative framework.
Elegant and accessible prose: The book is written in Eagleton's characteristically clear and engaging style, making complex historical and theoretical material accessible.

Criticisms & Weaknesses

Jurgen Habermas, whose concept of the public sphere Eagleton relies on, might argue that Eagleton's use of his framework is too nostalgic. Habermas himself did not present the decline of the bourgeois public sphere as an irreversible loss but as a transformation that could be reversed through new forms of democratic communication. Eagleton's narrative of decline is more pessimistic than Habermas's own position.

Bruce Robbins, in Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, and Culture (1993), criticizes Eagleton's nostalgia for a pre-professional criticism. Robbins argues that there was never a golden age of public criticism — the eighteenth-century public sphere was itself exclusionary (no women, no working class) and its claim to rational-critical debate was ideological. Professionalization, Robbins argues, is not simply a fall from grace but a complex process with both positive and negative effects.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in her critique of Eagleton's Marxism, would note that the book's focus on English criticism reproduces the Eurocentrism of its object of study. The function of criticism in colonial and postcolonial contexts cannot be understood through the lens of the European public sphere, and Eagleton's framework has little to say about the role of critics in anti-colonial struggles.

Jonathan Rose, in The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001), offers a historical challenge to Eagleton's argument. Rose shows that working-class readers and critics created their own public sphere independent of the bourgeois institutions Eagleton describes, suggesting that the story of criticism's decline is more complex than Eagleton allows.

Antony Easthope, in Literary into Cultural Studies (1991), argues from a post-structuralist perspective that Eagleton's nostalgia for the public sphere is politically regressive. Easthope contends that the breakdown of unified critical discourse celebrated by post-structuralism opens possibilities for multiple, contestatory critical practices that Eagleton's framework cannot accommodate.

Comparative Analysis

Eagleton's book is usefully compared with Russell Jacoby's The Last Intellectuals (1987), which tells a similar story of decline in the American context. Both books lament the disappearance of the public intellectual and blame professionalization. However, Jacoby's book is more sociological and less Marxist, focusing on generational change and the structure of academic careers rather than the transformation of the public sphere.

Edward Said's The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983) offers an alternative vision of the critic's vocation. Said shares Eagleton's commitment to politically engaged criticism but grounds it in a more cosmopolitan and exilic perspective. Where Eagleton calls for the critic to be a revolutionary, Said calls for the critic to be a secular, oppositional intellectual.

John Guillory's Cultural Capital (1993) offers the most sophisticated sociological analysis of the literary-critical profession. Guillory's book goes beyond Eagleton's narrative of decline to examine the specific mechanisms through which the literary canon and critical practice are shaped by educational institutions and class structures.

Impact & Legacy

The Function of Criticism has been less widely read than Literary Theory: An Introduction but has been influential within literary studies, particularly among scholars interested in the history of criticism and the sociology of intellectual life. The book's Habermasian framework has been taken up by scholars working on the history of the public sphere and its relation to cultural production.

The book's most controversial argument — that post-structuralism is a symptom of criticism's decline rather than a radical new departure — has been widely debated but has not been widely accepted. Most scholars of deconstruction have rejected Eagleton's characterization, arguing that deconstruction is more politically engaged than he allows.

Reading Recommendation

| Reader Type | Recommendation | |-------------|---------------| | Student of literary theory | Read for the historical background to contemporary debates | | Scholar of public sphere theory | Read for the application of Habermas to literary history | | Graduate student in English | Read for the argument about professionalization that still resonates | | General reader interested in criticism | Read the Introduction and Conclusion for the core thesis |

Summary Sufficiency

Rating: 7/10

The book is a valuable historical study that offers a provocative thesis about the transformation of criticism. However, it is not sufficient as a standalone account of criticism's history, as it is selective in its focus and tendentious in its argument. Readers should supplement with primary historical sources and with alternative accounts of the same period.

narration

The Function of Criticism is written in a more measured and scholarly tone than Literary Theory: An Introduction. The combative epigrams are fewer, the argument more sustained, the historical scholarship more in evidence. This is not a textbook but a monograph — it advances a specific thesis through historical argument rather than surveying a field.

Eagleton's prose retains its characteristic clarity. He moves easily between theoretical exposition (explaining Habermas's public sphere), historical narrative (describing the coffee house culture of eighteenth-century London), and polemical critique (condemning the political evasions of deconstruction). The transitions between these registers are smooth, and the book maintains a consistent argumentative momentum.

The book's structure is chronological, following criticism from its eighteenth-century origins through its nineteenth-century institutionalization to its twentieth-century professionalization and crisis. This linear narrative gives the book a clear trajectory but also makes its argument vulnerable to charges of oversimplification — history is rarely as neatly directional as Eagleton's narrative suggests.

The tone is serious and occasionally melancholic. Eagleton is writing about something he cares about deeply — the political vocation of criticism — and the book has an elegiac quality, as if he were chronicling the death of an ideal. This is not the confident, combative Eagleton of Literary Theory but a more reflective and historically minded writer.