Culture

March 28, 2016
Fans of esteemed literary theorist Eagleton (Why Marx Was Right) will be pleased with this analysis of culture as the sum of “values, customs, beliefs and symbolic practices.” Eagleton carefully distinguishes culture from civilization, “a world which is humanly manufactured.” He places particular emphasis on two 18th-century thinkers, political theorist Edmund Burke and philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, for realizing culture’s populist potential. His historical survey, which also touches on several later writers (Oscar Wilde, T.S. Eliot, Raymond Williams), traces his subject from the French Revolution to the War on Terror. Eagleton argues that contemporary crises, such as “the clash between Western capitalism and radical Islam,” are wrongly reduced to clashes of culture when they are geopolitical. In a diatribe against cultural studies, he accuses the discipline of not challenging class disparities, “deal in sexuality but not socialism, transgression but not revolution, difference but not justice, identity but not the culture of poverty.” He bemoans modern capitalism’s nefarious influence, arguing that this has led to “the global decline of the universities,” in which they have become “pseudo-capitalist enterprises under the sway of a brutally philistine managerial ideology.” Though these scathing critiques come across as shortsighted, they still contain Eagleton’s characteristic wit. He does not make the “true” definition of culture any less elusive, but his book is nonetheless an impressive display of erudition.