Page 216 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 207

Cultural criticism and cultural policy

Perhaps more interestingly, this is true also of neo-Marxists such
as Eagleton, most obviously so in the book that takes its title from
Arnold, The Function of Criticism. Following Habermas, Eagleton
analyses seventeenth- and eighteenth-century criticism as a
discourse of the early liberal public sphere. He stressed the
unusually consensual form taken by the English variant of
eighteenth-century criticism: unlike its continental counterparts,
it functioned so as to facilitate a fusion of aristocratic and
bourgeois—that is, Cavalier and Puritan—values. Nonetheless,
early English criticism had reproduced all the essential features
of the early bourgeois public sphere. ‘A polite, informed public
opinion pits itself against the arbitrary diktats of autocracy’, wrote
Eagleton:

within the translucent space of the public sphere it is
supposedly no longer social power, privilege and tradition
which confer upon individuals the title to speak and judge,
but the degree to which they are constituted as discoursing
subjects by sharing in a consensus of universal reason
(Eagleton, 1996a, p. 9).

This bourgeois public sphere was progressively undermined
during the nineteenth century, according to Eagleton, first, by the
expansion of the literary market and the concomitant rise of an
anonymous public and, second, by the eruption into the public
sphere of social interests opposed to its rational norms, in partic-
ular the working class, radicalism, feminism and dissent.
Criticism was thus increasingly faced with the choice between a
general cultural humanism, which became necessarily increas-
ingly amateur as capitalist society developed, and an expert
professionalism, which could only achieve intellectual legitimacy
at the price of social relevance. The eventual outcome was the
institutionalisation of criticism within the universities. Leavisism
was thus the guilty conscience of this academicism, ‘nothing less
than an attempt to reinvent the classical public sphere, at a time
when its material conditions had definitively passed’ (p. 75).
Eagleton clearly aspires to reverse both the Leavisite special-
isation of criticism to ‘Literature’ and the substitution of

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