The first time you publish a review, once the temporary excitement of the byline wears off, you are forced to confront an age-old question: What’s the point? You might get a pat on the back, a passing sense that you belong to a Republic of Letters, but it’s hard to shake material and spiritual realities: The poor prospects in regards to work and fulfillment, made worse by what, Dave Hickey calls, the inescapable fact that the critic is a parasite on the thing itself, the great novel or work of art whose vitality you draw from but can’t create yourself. Even seasoned masters of our down-low vocation can’t help but wring their hands and worry about their own irrelevance. It’s because they know their fear to be true: that criticism is in crisis.

This lament has haunted every generation of critics, a perennial complaint that emerges from both external and internal sources. The criticism published in magazines and newspapers—unimaginative and workaday—has become far too polluted by “bland commendations.” And the reading public, or whatever’s left of it, could care less about your opinions. This is not to say that our lives aren’t filled with the passing of judgment; everyone wants their thoughts on their favorite TV shows or energy drinks to carry weight. But the professional critic’s take has to vie for people’s attention in this morass of opinion.

Herein lies another source of the crisis: Critics want to be listened to, to have their opinions matter, to be both persuasive and authoritative. They want to earn their audiences, even if the conditions of modern life—the scant amount of time we have to devote to leisure, the soul-crushing work of earning a wage—make this task harder. As the critic Andrea Long Chu points out in her new essay collection Authority, “criticism is always going through [a] self-aggrandizing existential crisis,” in part because it wants to have the authority to command the public attention so often denied it.

Chu’s ambition in her aptly (and trollingly) titled collection is to think through what this sense of critical authority has meant in the past and present, and whether it is, or ever was, attainable. Authority, which includes previously published reviews and two new essays that stake out her theory of criticism, is her effort “to historicize the peculiar tendency among critics to gnash their teeth over the state of criticism during any given period, including our own.” Puncturing this sense of crisis is part of a larger project: Chu wants to deflate the lofty self-regard in which criticism holds itself—a necessary task, in her view, in making the critic relevant again. This wake-up call, for her, amounts to a simple question: Can critics get a grip?

Chu, who is a staff writer at New York magazine and the recent winner of a Pulitzer Prize in criticism, has ascended to the heights of her profession in less than a decade. She got her start writing for n+1 when she was still a grad student at New York University in the late 2010s, publishing stylish and formidably intelligent essays that fused memoir and theory as she tackled a wide range of topics, from gender, television, and mental health to, above all, her conflicts with herself.

Chu’s early writing—strenuous and searching—would be hard for any writer to sustain for long, and so once at New York she turned to the slightly more conventional and commercially friendly form of magazine criticism. Despite the shift in form, however, the content and style have remained the same. Her interests continue to be capacious—she can write expertly on The Phantom of the Opera, popular video games, and literary theory—and the emotional intensity of her work is still evident.

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Success has not rid Chu of a feeling of ambivalence about her line of work. In a withering review of Maggie Nelson’s On Freedom, for instance, she sneaks in what I take to be a fearful statement on the inanity of the critic in general: “She does not have ideas, only opinions. I don’t mean that she is not an intelligent thinker and, sometimes, a formidable stylist; I mean that she does not advance new concepts, nor is she, by her own description, interested in doing so.”

A more serious and immediate occasion prompted Chu to reconsider her profession: the cancellation of an event at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. After Israel began its brutal assault on Gaza after the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, a group of writers, including Viet Thanh Nguyen, signed a letter that called for an end to “the unprecedented and indiscriminate violence that is still escalating against the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza.” Shortly afterward, 92NY canceled a panel Nguyen was on, numerous employees at the arts center resigned, and a number of writers chose to pull their own scheduled events there. Chu was among them. She was originally supposed to give a lecture on the “state of criticism today”; in response to the 92NY debacle, and all of the other troubling developments of life in the 2020s (climate change, police violence, the attack on abortion and gender-affirming healthcare), she felt compelled to examine what, if anything, she could say about criticism in such dire times.

The first essay in Authority is a revised version of the lecture Chu planned to deliver at 92NY. Wide-ranging and polemical, it begins with a recitation of our myriad contemporary crises and then takes a look at the history of the form to see how critics have long understood the relationship between their work and their times. What she finds is that many of our most established and well-respected critics, from Matthew Arnold to James Wood, have tended to write with great intensity and rigor about the literary works before them but have remained, at least explicitly, uninterested in the world around them.

For Chu, this is a grave mistake: Critics should stop kidding themselves and admit (and embrace) the fact that their work is political. “The critic cannot help but have moral and political beliefs, and therefore he must give serious thought to what he actually believes,” she explains. Instead of running away from politics, the critical class needs to abandon a value system that rates “a critic on the basis of her mental attitude—her poise, her catholicity, her scrupulousness—rather than the ideological content of her judgments.”

So where do we go from there? Chu’s argument scatters across the page like birdshot. She claims that a “crisis of confidence in liberalism” barely lurks beneath the surface of all the hemming and hawing of famous critics, but insists that the “inflated political claims” of academic literary critics are just as bad as the deflated political claims of nonacademic, mainstream ones; and, hoping to bring everything back to earth, she asserts the necessity of criticism to be a “functional” and practical art that owes something to the public. One way to solve the crisis of criticism, she insists, is to view criticism as labor—not an avocation but a job like all the rest.

Ultimately, Chu finds that “there is nothing inherently emancipatory, empowering, or even particularly enlightening about criticism.” While she insists that critics have a responsibility to their public and an imperative to pursue “moral clarity” in their writing, she allows for some pessimism and vanity. What, she asks, can the critic do in the face of grueling headwinds, and how might they transform the way their readers think about the world? Her answer:

If our digital age has shown us anything, it is not that everyone’s a critic; it is that actually being a critic is, for most people and certainly for most critics, an experience of anxiety, resentment, distress, and failure. If I have made that experience a bit more tolerable, then I have done my job.

As you might notice, we are now far from where we started, but Chu does finally give us her definition of good criticism: “The genuinely good critic…must know the difference between an existential crisis, whose elements may be freely swapped around without any appreciable effect on the whole, and an actual historical event, whose meaning emerges from the gritty particularity of its parts.” In other words, the good critic knows the real crisis isn’t found within our field, but is to be found everywhere else. This is why Chu devotes her book to getting to the bottom of why we desire authority in the first place—it’s a sickness that infects all critics, one we must cure. And to begin doing this work, she thinks we need to go back to the dawn of Western civilization, and so she drops us into the middle of the Roman Senate.

Long Chu begins in Rome because, like many words in the Western lexicon, authority has its roots in Latin: auctoritas, “the basic sense of an opinion or judgment, and by extension, an ability to influence others.” This concept was given some substance by the governing bodies of Roman society, first the Senate, whose pedigreed members issued written decrees on how their fellow Romans should conduct themselves, and later, when the emperor came into the picture, monarchial will and fiat (rubber-stamped by the Senate) determined right and wrong.

What is crucial about this first articulation of authority, Chu argues (invoking Hannah Arendt), is that “authority, unlike power, had no inherent forces of its own; it commanded not through threats of violence…but by appealing to tradition.” In this way, authority’s expression was at once “above” the law but also “an elusive and intangible” ingredient in what the law was meant to compel—guiding us in how to live. For the critic—who will not emerge, in Chu’s history, until the 18th century—this almost oracular idea of authority, she believes, is central to the drama of taste-making and gatekeeping, the activities critics engage in to determine firstly what is beautiful, and secondly what constitutes a good and moral life.

From here, Chu hops and skips through the epochs and eras of the Anglo-American and European intellectual traditions, moving from the end of the Roman Empire to the rise of Catholicism, and then to the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the era of classical liberalism, before ending with the American university and its role in making everything worse. Helpfully, after wading through citations from Martin Luther, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Samuel Johnson, Matthew Arnold, Oscar Wilde, Immanuel Kant, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, F.R. Leavis, Lionel Trilling, and many more, we begin to see Chu’s larger point—that an essential component of the critic’s pursuit of authority is rooted in fact that the critic has always been a political agent, whether one likes it or not:

Why do we ask the critic to have authority? It is not out of a romantic desire to improve our understanding of art; nor is it because we wish to be subjected to the tyranny of someone else’s opinion. It is because we are inheritors of a history, one in which the critic has consistently been understood as embodying a key political figure: in the eighteenth century, an enlightened king; in the nineteenth, a free citizen; in the twentieth, a state bureaucrat. Implicit in this scheme is a belief that there is something inescapably political about what the critic does—that every act of judgment tests one’s ability as a member of society to submit voluntarily to the authority of the law. We are almost shocked at how often the critics of every age have compared bad criticism to bad citizenship until we remember how often we are told today, by very well-meaning people who surely have our best interests at heart, that criticism prepares us to be “global citizens.”

What Chu, broadly speaking, presents in her essay on authority is a potted history of the invention of the liberal critic, a figure who is devoted to the “belief that freedom of ideas has an important administrative function within any constitutional republic.” The central figure in this story is Kant, who laid the foundations for modern criticism by ridding it of the era’s positivism. “Kant took the futility of aesthetic science and reframed it as a maxim for the critic,” she writes: “Always assume that beauty has a rational explanation, but never pretend to know what it is.” What Kant helped usher in, she continues, is an entire order of liberal critics who understood that their task was “to keep taste free of any practical interests that would reduce it to usefulness or morality,” but who would remain committed, in their appeal to beauty and order, to the ideals of freedom of thought and expression inherent to liberalism.

This sensibility, which insists on “art for art’s sake” but ultimately serves as propaganda for the state, is one that Chu argues has been taken up—in many different ways—by critics over the last two centuries: by the Romantics, the Victorians, the New Critics, and the New York Intellectuals. Gradually, the critic went from being an outsider, opining on the marginal expressions of human art, to nothing more than another bureaucrat, who regardless of their self-professed political affiliations ends up indirectly reaffirming the status quo.

As Marc Maron might say, every person has “their guys,” and it is unfair to deny Chu the right to claim certain forebears over others, but it’s hard to ignore whom she leaves out of her version of history, those figures who might have had the right questions to pose for the problem at hand. There is no Hegel, no Marx, no Nietzsche, and no Freud here. And those are just the obvious white dudes: An entire party bus full of feminist critics and critics of color weren’t invited either. Chu insists that critics should abandon their desire to obtain authority, but she’s seemingly not all that interested in the vast tradition outside liberal criticism that already does this.

The likes of Philip Rahv and Mary McCarthy would break a beer bottle over your head if you called them a liberal, and yet for Chu, they too fit into the overarching liberalism that defines criticism. They also apparently belong to a school of thought that came after them:

It would not be wrong to say that criticism as the New York intellectuals practiced it was of a piece with the liberal theory of justice put forth by John Rawls in 1971—in particular, the idea that justice consists in equal access to “the most extensive scheme of basic liberties compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for others.” There may have been no greater triumph for rational authority within criticism than the claim that the critic’s judgments in public and the administration of the state were both based on fairness.

Like so many of our best contemporary writers, Chu emerged from the wreckage of this country’s PhD programs, but she differs from some of her peers who ended up as more traditional critics: She has reconciled, in her work, a certain belletrism with the rigor and dispassion of an academic critic. She has achieved, at times, what Irving Howe said the New York Intellectuals achieved (even if she might curiously call them “Rawlsians”), which is to write in a mode that is “nervous, strewn with knotty or flashy phrases, impatient with transitions and other concessions to dullness, willfully calling attention to itself as a form or at least an outcry, fond of rapid twists, taking pleasure in dispute, dialectic, dazzle.”

In the best works of criticism in Authority, one finds this nervous, flashy, dialectical mode of thinking on full display. In her sensitive and searching piece of memoir on transitioning (“On Liking Women”) and in her most rigorously convincing takedowns (of Hanya Yanagihara and Otessa Moshfegh), Chu not only demonstrates the value of criticism at its boldest and, yes, most authoritative but also finds a way to effectively marry—in a way that her predecessors often struggled with—experience and expertise, aesthetics and politics.

Sentences like this one, from “On Liking Women,” have knocked around in my head for years for the sensitivity that it accesses in crystallizing the emotional turmoil of gendered life: “The richness of our want is staggering. Perhaps this is why coming out can feel like crushing, why a first dress can feel like a first kiss, why dysphoria can feel like heartbreak. The other name for disappointment, after all, is love.”

This kind of writing would work in any era, but it works particularly well in an era of disaggregation where you might encounter these nuggets of seeming perfection on your timeline, as objects in themselves that we can appreciate for their wholeness divorced from a larger piece of analysis. There are plenty of other good lines, and they often come when Chu is lobbing a barb at an older, more complacent generation, at the likes of Bret Easton Ellis (“Having never grown up himself, he clings to the hope that someone else will grow up in his place”), Zadie Smith (“a very consistent feature of Smith’s career as a public intellectual: her almost involuntary tendency to reframe all political questions as ‘human’ ones”), Joey Soloway (“The nicest thing that can be said of [his] oblivious, self-absorbed, unimportant book is that it proves, once and for all, that trans people are fully, regrettably human”), and others.

For some, reading these pans is a form of intellectual entertainment in its own right. Chu’s arch dismissal of these writers is not just an opportunity to witness some critical street fighting but also an affirmation of her own style: Even while negating others, she generates, through her eloquent and immense dissatisfaction, an experience of recognition in her audience, who desperately desire someone to tell them that the popular and celebrated art of our times is ultimately hollow. Which is to say that Chu’s targets are often easy ones, but she dispatches them with such technical proficiency that you can’t help but admire the work she’s done.

Reading all of these essays together, sandwiched between her pronouncements on what criticism is and should be, it’s easy to see that Chu does not necessarily take her own advice. She may seek to dethrone the James Woods and Zadie Smiths of this world, but what makes her a great writer is not so dissimilar from what makes them great: their style and their confidence in their vision of what constitutes good and bad art. (One could even say that Chu’s idea of good art is much less assured than her pronouncements on what sucks.)

So what, in the end, distinguishes Chu from some of her adversaries? She too writes with a great intensity and has earned an audience that appreciates her verve, and yet she can’t shake a dissatisfaction with this system and its rewards—she wants to burn it all down. At the end of Authority, Chu asserts that the only criticism that is “worth doing…is not the kind that claims to improve society in general; it is, as the late John Berger once wrote, the kind that helps to destroy this particular one.”

There’s a certain appeal to tearing it all down, but I wonder if criticism is better suited to another task. Critics don’t always make for the best world-destroyers, but we can still engage our readers to question what they believe.

Irving Howe—one of the figures left out of Chu’s history—once offered a vision of criticism that refused to conform to the pieties of the day and also concerned itself with something more humane. “The most glorious vision of the intellectual life is still that which is loosely called humanist,” he wrote: “the idea of a mind committed yet dispassionate, ready to stand alone, curious, eager, skeptical. The banner of critical independence, ragged and torn though it may be, is still the best we have.”

Howe was not saying that criticism should transform the world either; he understood the political limits of the critic and, for that matter, any intellectual. But he still found, in his own “age of conformity,” that the vital energies of chatter and commentary could produce a public sphere worth defending—that in one’s confident avowals of judgment and opinion, the contours of a new world can emerge. Even if a critic can never truly become an authority, she can still write something—clarifying, affirming—that makes the experience of living today less disorienting. And when that happens, she has done her job: She is telling us something we don’t already know.