Cultural critic

Professional who reasonably judges the norms and behaviors of a society

A cultural critic is a critic of a given culture, usually as a whole. Cultural criticism has significant overlap with social and cultural theory. While such criticism is simply part of the self-consciousness of the culture, the social positions of the critics and the medium they use vary widely. The conceptual and political grounding of criticism also changes over time.

## Terminology

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Contemporary usage has tended to include all types of criticism directed at culture.

The term "cultural criticism" itself has been claimed by Jacques Barzun: No such thing was recognized or in favour when we [i.e. Barzun and Trilling] began--more by intuition than design--in the autumn of 1934.[1][2] It has been argued that in the inter-war period, the language of literary criticism was adequate for the needs of cultural critics; but that later it mainly served academe.[3] Alan Trachtenberg's Critics of Culture (1976) concentrated on American intellectuals of the 1920s who were "nonacademic" (including H. L. Mencken and Lewis Mumford), where the 1995 collection American Cultural Critics covered mainly later figures, such as F. O. Matthiessen and Susan Sontag, involved in debates on American culture as national.[4]

In contrast, a work such as Richard Wolin's 1995 The Terms of Cultural Criticism: The Frankfurt School, Existentialism, Poststructuralism (1995) uses it as a broad-brush description.

## Victorian sages as critics

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Cultural critics came to the scene in the nineteenth century. Matthew Arnold[5] and Thomas Carlyle are leading examples of a cultural critic of the Victorian age; in Arnold there is also a concern for religion. John Ruskin was another. Because of an equation made between ugliness of material surroundings and an impoverished life, aesthetes and others might be considered implicitly to be engaging in cultural criticism, but the actual articulation is what makes a critic. In France, Charles Baudelaire was a cultural critic, as was Søren Kierkegaard in Denmark and Friedrich Nietzsche in Germany.

## Twentieth century

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Further information: Critical theory, Frankfurt School, Theodor W. Adorno, and Culture industry

In the twentieth century Irving Babbitt on the right, and Walter Benjamin[6] on the left, might be considered major cultural critics. The field of play has changed considerably, in that the humanities have broadened to include cultural studies of all kinds, which are grounded in critical theory. This trend is not without its dissidents, however; James Seaton has written extensively in defense of the continued importance of the Humanistic Tradition Irving Babbitt and his heirs championed, while criticizing the dominance of critical theory in the teaching of literature. Theory's Empire: An Anthology of Dissent features a collection of essays from prominent English professors, writers and critics stating their disagreement with the prominent role given to critical theory in English departments.

## Notable contemporary critics

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* Allan Bloom[7]
* Theodore Dalrymple
* Guy Debord
* Henry Louis Gates Jr.[8]
* Mark Kingwell
* Neil Postman
* Daniel Quinn[9]
* Richard Rorty
* Pierre Schaeffer
* James Seaton
* Fran Lebowitz
* Slavoj Žižek

## See also

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* Criticism of multiculturalism
* Cultural pessimism
* Counterculture
* Semiotics of culture
* Social criticism

## Notes

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1. ^ Remembering Lionel Trilling, (1976), reprinted in The Jacques Barzun Reader (2002).
2. ^ Casey Nelson Blake, a professor at Columbia University where Barzun and Trilling were, uses the term in the 1990 book title Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford.
3. ^ Bullard, Paddy (2019). The Oxford Handbook of Eighteenth-Century Satire. Oxford University Press. p. 710\. ISBN 9780198727835.
4. ^ Murray, David (1995). American Cultural Critics. University of Exeter Press. pp. 1–2\. ISBN 9780859894043.
5. ^ His much-cited Culture and Anarchy was subtitled An Essay in Political and Social Criticism.
6. ^ E.g. Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (1994), series Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism, 7.
7. ^ "A CULTURAL CRITIC ANSWERS HIS OWN".
8. ^ "Scholar, cultural critic Gates to give Kent Lecture".
9. ^ "Schooling: The Hidden Agenda". Archived from the original on 2013-01-20. Retrieved 2008-11-19.

## External links

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* Joseph Wood Krutch as a Cultural Critic by John Margolis

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Culture

Outline

Sciences|

* Cultural anthropology
* Cultural astronomy
* Cultural ecology
* Cultural geography
* Cultural neuroscience
* Cultural studies
* Culturology
* Culture theory

Subfields|

* Bioculture
* Cross-cultural studies
* Cross-cultural communication
* Cross-cultural leadership
* Cross-cultural psychiatry
* Cross-cultural psychology
* Cultural analytics
* Cultural economics
* Cultural entomology
* Cultural history
* Cultural mapping
* Cultural mediation
* Cultural psychology
* Cultural values
* Culturomics
* Intercultural learning
* Intercultural relations
* Philosophy of culture
* Popular culture studies
* Postcritique
* Semiotics of culture
* Sociology of culture
* Sound culture
* Theology of culture
* Transcultural nursing

Types|

* Constructed culture
* Dominant culture
* Folk culture
* High culture
* Individualistic culture
* Legal culture
* Microculture
* Official culture
* Political culture
* Civic
* Popular culture
* Low culture
* Media culture
* Recombinant culture
* Remix culture
* Trash culture
* Urban
* Primitive culture
* Resistance through culture
* Subculture
* Alternative culture
* Counterculture
* Fandom
* Far-right subcultures
* Underground culture
* Youth subculture
* list
* Super culture
* Vernacular culture
* Culture by location

Aspects|

* Acculturation
* Cultural appreciation
* Cultural appropriation
* Cultural area
* Cultural artifact
* Cultural baggage
* Cultural bias
* Cultural capital
* Cross-cultural
* Cultural communication
* Cultural conflict
* Cultural cringe
* Cultural dissonance
* Cultural emphasis
* Cultural framework
* Cultural heritage
* Destroyed
* Cultural icon
* Cultural identity
* Cultural industry
* Cultural invention
* Cultural landscape
* Cultural learning
* Cultural leveling
* Cultural memory
* Cultural pluralism
* Cultural practice
* Cultural property
* Cultural reproduction
* Cultural system
* Cultural technology
* Cultural universal
* Cultureme
* Enculturation
* High- and low-context cultures
* Interculturality
* Internet culture
* Manuscript culture
* Material culture
* Non-material culture
* Organizational culture
* Assessment culture
* Design culture
* Journalism culture
* Print culture
* Protoculture
* Relational mobility
* Safety culture
* Symbolic culture
* Technoculture
* Trans-cultural diffusion
* Transculturation
* Visual culture

Politics|

* Colonial mentality
* Consumer capitalism
* Cross cultural sensitivity
* Cultural assimilation
* Cultural attaché
* Cultural backwardness
* Cultural Bolshevism
* Cultural conservatism
* Cultural contracts
* Cultural deprivation
* Cultural diplomacy
* Cultural environmentalism
* Cultural exception
* Cultural feminism
* Cultural genocide
* Cultural globalization
* Cultural hegemony
* Cultural imperialism
* Cultural intelligence
* Cultural liberalism
* Cultural nationalism
* Cultural pessimism
* Cultural policy
* Cultural racism
* Cultural radicalism
* Cultural retention
* Cultural Revolution
* Cultural rights
* Cultural safety
* Cultural silence
* Cultural subsidy
* Cultural Zionism
* Culture change
* Culture minister
* Culture of fear
* Culture war
* Deculturalization
* Dominator culture
* Interculturalism
* Monoculturalism
* Multiculturalism
* Biculturalism
* Multiracial democracy
* Pluriculturalism
* Polyculturalism
* Transculturism

Religions|

* Buddhism
* Christianity
* Catholicism
* Cultural Christians
* Protestantism
* Role of Christianity in civilization
* Eastern Orthodoxy
* Mormonism
* Cultural Hindus
* Islam
* Cultural Muslims
* Judaism
* Sikhism

Related|

* Algorithmic culture
* Animal culture
* Archaeological culture
* Bennett scale
* Cannabis culture
* Circuit of culture
* Civilization
* Coffee culture
* Cringe culture
* Cross-cultural
* Cultural center
* Cultural competence
* Cultural critic
* Cultural determinism
* Cultural diversity
* Cultural evolutionism
* Cultural homogenization
* Cultural institution
* Cultural jet lag
* Cultural lag
* Cultural literacy
* Cultural mosaic
* Cultural movement
* Cultural mulatto
* Cultural probe
* Cultural relativism
* Cultural tourism
* Pop-culture
* Cultural translation
* Cultural turn
* Cultural sensibility
* Culture and menstruation
* Culture and positive psychology
* Culture and social cognition
* Culture gap
* Culture hero
* Culture industry
* Culture shock
* Culturgen
* Children's culture
* Culturalism
* Cyberculture
* Death and culture
* Disability culture
* Deaf culture
* Drinking culture
* Drug culture
* Eastern culture
* Emotions and culture
* Historical culture
* Intercultural communication
* Intercultural competence
* Languaculture
* Living things in culture
* Media culture
* Oppositional culture
* Participatory culture
* Permission culture
* Rape culture
* Remix culture
* Tea culture
* Transformation of culture
* Urban culture
* Welfare culture
* Western culture
* Youth culture

* Category

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Social philosophy

Concepts|

* Agency
* Anomie
* Convention
* Cosmopolitanism
* Customs
* Cultural heritage
* Culturalism
* Inter
* Mono
* Multi
* Culture
* Counter
* Familialism
* History
* Honour
* Human nature
* Identity
* Formation
* Ideology
* Institutions
* Invisible hand
* Loyalty
* Modernity
* Morality
* Public
* Mores
* National character
* Natural law
* Personhood
* Reification
* Ressentiment
* Rights
* Sittlichkeit
* Social alienation
* Social norms
* Spontaneous order
* Stewardship
* Traditions
* Values
* Family
* Volksgeist
* Worldview

Schools|

* Budapest School
* Catholic social teaching
* Distributism
* Communitarianism
* Confucianism
* Conservatism
* Social
* Frankfurt School
* Personalism

Philosophers|

| Ancient|

* Confucius
* Laozi
* Mencius
* Mozi
* Xunzi

|

Medieval|

* Alpharabius
* Aquinas
* Avempace
* Bruni
* Ibn Khaldun
* Maimonides
* Ibn Tufayl

Early modern|

* Calvin
* Erasmus
* Guicciardini
* Locke
* Luther
* Milton
* Montaigne
* Müntzer

18th and 19th
centuries|

* Arnold
* Bentham
* Bonald
* Burke
* Carlyle
* Comte
* Condorcet
* Emerson
* Engels
* Fichte
* Fourier
* Franklin
* Hegel
* Helvétius
* Herder
* Hume
* Jefferson
* Kant
* Kierkegaard
* Le Bon
* Le Play
* Marx
* Mill
* Nietzsche
* Owen
* Renan
* Rousseau
* Royce
* Ruskin
* Smith
* Spencer
* de Staël
* Stirner
* Taine
* Thoreau
* Tocqueville
* Vico
* Vivekananda
* Voltaire

20th and 21st
centuries|

* Adorno
* Agamben
* Arendt
* Aron
* Badiou
* Baudrillard
* Bauman
* Benoist
* Berlin
* Butler
* Camus
* de Beauvoir
* Debord
* Deleuze
* Dewey
* Du Bois
* Durkheim
* Eco
* Evola
* Foucault
* Fromm
* Gandhi
* Gehlen
* Gentile
* Gramsci
* Guénon
* Habermas
* Han
* Heidegger
* Hoppe
* Irigaray
* Kirk
* Kołakowski
* Kropotkin
* Land
* Lasch
* MacIntyre
* Marcuse
* Maritain
* Negri
* Niebuhr
* Nussbaum
* Oakeshott
* Ortega
* Pareto
* Polanyi
* Radhakrishnan
* Röpke
* Santayana
* Scruton
* Shariati
* Simmel
* Skinner
* Sombart
* Sowell
* Spengler
* Strauss
* Taylor
* Voegelin
* Walzer
* Weber
* Weil
* Zinn
* Žižek

Works|

* De Officiis (44 BC)
* Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486)
* A Vindication of Natural Society (1756)
* Democracy in America (1835–1840)
* Civilization and Its Discontents (1930)
* The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935)
* The Second Sex (1949)
* One-Dimensional Man (1964)
* The Society of the Spectacle (1967)
* The History of Sexuality (1976)
* The Culture of Narcissism (1979)
* A Conflict of Visions (1987)
* The Closing of the American Mind (1987)
* Gender Trouble (1990)
* The Malaise of Modernity (1991)
* Intellectuals and Society (2010)

See also|

* Agnotology
* Axiology
* Critical theory
* Cultural criticism
* Cultural pessimism
* Ethics
* Historism
* Historicism
* Humanities
* Philosophy of culture
* Philosophy of education
* Philosophy of history
* Political philosophy
* Social criticism
* Social science
* Social theory
* Sociology

* Category

Authority control databases: National |

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