Authority

Criticism is in a crisis of authority—or rather, that’s what critics have been saying ever since the Enlightenment. In a magisterial new essay, Chu offers a revised intellectual history of this supposed crisis, tracing the surprisingly political contours of criticism from its origins in eighteenth-century aesthetics all the way to its present form in the age of social media. Rather than succumbing to an endless cycle of trumped-up emergencies, Authority makes a compelling case for how to do criticism in light of the genuine crises, from authoritarianism to genocide, that confront us today. [publisher's note]