American Book Review

Early in Criticism and Politics: A Polemical Introduction, Bruce Robbins tells of the time when his daughter, at age seven or eight, was asked what her father did for a living, and she replied, "Daddy is a criticizer." Robbins notes that this is basically accurate (both about him and his profession), and he then asserts that "One point of this book is to explain to literary critics and interested others how and why our discipline criticizes and why such work is worth doing, even when it doesn't seem very nice."

It might be best to approach Criticism and Politics first by focusing on its subtitle, which some readers might find a bit jarring. Attaching the idea of a polemic to that of an "introduction" produces a sort of estrangement effect, particularly as "mere" introductions to literary and cultural criticism over the years have mostly sought to appear, if not always to be, disinterested, even objective. Polemics, on the contrary, are always situated and engaged, coming as [End Page 153] they do from a particular position with respect to others in their domain, and the thrust of the discourse is normally athwart those in favor of the object of the polemic in question. And yet, as we frequently find, those who would appear disinterested in introducing an inherently political subject likely have their own political agendas, whether they care to admit it or not. The main thesis of Criticism and Politics, in fact, is that criticism is and has always been political, and hence that efforts to depoliticize criticism or to suggest that criticism could be practiced entirely outside of political considerations not only mischaracterize the project of criticism but also oppose it. As Robbins discusses at length, one can identify clear relationships between anti-critical forms of criticism, within academe and outside of it, and real political forces that endanger education, reinforce structures of inequality, promote a neoliberal economic order, and fan the flames of racist, nationalist, or otherwise exclusionary social movements. Under the circumstances, a self-consciously polemical introduction to the subject makes a good deal of sense.

Robbins has been at this quite a while and is now unquestionably a leading authority on criticism and politics (and the politics of criticism). His first book, The Servant's Hand: English Fiction from Below (1986), is a good example of what Joseph North provocatively called the "historicist/contextualist paradigm" in criticism, as Robbins examined the social circumstances and literary representations of servants, a distinctive segment of the working class, in defining British literary history. Then, with Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture (1993), Robbins launched a vigorous defense of academic literary criticism and professional expertise, which found him standing up to mostly right-wing critics of higher education during the "culture wars" of the era, but also standing athwart many on the left who were critical of expertise and professionalization on more-or-less democratic grounds. Notwithstanding the distance between that time and the present, these concerns are still with us and are addressed further in Criticism and Politics.

For many, Robbins will be best known as a theorist and critic of cosmopolitanism, and he produced a trilogy of works—Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress (1999), Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence (2012), and The Beneficiary (2017)—that addressed the increasingly vexed problems of nationalism and worldliness in an age of globalization, [End Page 154] with particular attention paid to the degree to which all are implicated (literally, folded together or intertwined) in a world system in which terrible violence and injustice make possible great wealth and comfort. I should also mention his 2010 study, Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Toward a Literary History of the Welfare State, which displays Robbins's elegant combination of literary reading, historical research, political commitment, and social consciousness, linking the earlier work on "fiction from below" to the later studies of cosmopolitanism, all while demonstrating how academic literary and cultural criticism...