Review: Humanities Theory

Humanities Theory #

By Amanda Anderson and Simon During Oxford University Press, 2025

Anderson, Amanda, and Simon During. 2025. Humanities Theory. Literature and Politics series. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-891877-6 (hardback), 978-0-19-891878-3 (paperback).

Most books about the crisis of the humanities are written to reassure their readers, who are almost always humanists. This book is not, and that refusal is its distinction. Humanities Theory, a compact entry in Oxford's Literature and Politics series, pairs two long essays, Simon During's "The Humanities World" and Amanda Anderson's "Framing the Humanities," with a closing interview in which the authors respond to each other. The series editors bill the essays as diverging accounts, which undersells the situation. I will argue that the book's real subject is a collision it never quite stages: During and Anderson disagree about what the humanities are, whether the academic version of them matters, and what a defense would even defend; their positions are rival ontologies, not complementary emphases; and the book's value lies in the fact that both are argued at full strength by people who know exactly what they are giving up.

During's cheerful demolition #

During's essay opens with a thought most professional humanists suppress: society could continue without the institutional humanities and be "basically just fine." He asks the question about institutionalized sport, answers it the same way, and lets the parallel sting. From there he builds his alternative object of analysis, the "humanities world," a loose conglomeration of practices, personae, moods, and values with "neither centre nor essence," divided into an academic half and an extramural half. The move has real analytic payoff. Once you see the humanities world whole, the crisis narrative changes shape: enrollments in English may have fallen roughly 30 percent in the US since 2012, but podcasts, substacks, museum exhibitions, and popular history are flooding the culture. During's most provocative suggestion is that these facts are connected, namely that the academic humanities may be shrinking partly because the commodified, digitalized extramural humanities are thriving. Addison wanted philosophy brought out of the colleges and into the coffeehouses in 1711; on During's telling, it is not obvious why its arrival there should count as a defeat.

The essay's positive characterization of the humanities is equally deft. Lacking an essence, they have dispositions. First comes truthfulness in Bernard Williams's sense, the virtues of accuracy and sincerity. Second comes the capacity to entertain propositions without believing them, which During traces from ancient skepticism through Montaigne to Eliot's Annahme. Last come two axes of tension, contemplation against curiosity and critique against construction. His retelling of Cicero's Pro Archia (the courtroom speech that coined studia humanitatis in defense of a Greek-speaking immigrant's citizenship, later translated by Du Bois for his rural students) is the best set piece in the book, quietly making the point that the humanities began as an argument for belonging without filiation.

The weaknesses mirror the strengths. During's sociology of decline (Guillory and Bourdieu on cultural capital, Piketty's Brahmin left and Merchant right) is stimulating but almost entirely stated rather than demonstrated, a sequence of big structural claims each carrying a single citation. He concedes at one point that the data on adjunctification is surprisingly thin, then proceeds as if the perception were the fact. And his equanimity about the academic humanities' dispensability sits oddly with his own account of what only they provide: the scale, patience, and professional authorization that produced the very scholarship his extramural world popularizes. The essay never quite faces the free-rider problem lurking in its own argument, namely that the thriving coffeehouse may be spending down an endowment the shrinking seminar room accumulated.

Anderson's forensic reframe #

Anderson's essay works the other side of the street. Where During dissolves the humanities into a world, she insists on re-specifying them, arguing that the generalized category "the humanities" has taken on a life of its own and now obscures the disciplines it was coined to group. Her opening analysis of media discourse is the sharpest thing in the book. Drawing on communications research, she shows that journalism treats science as disciplines producing "findings" while treating the humanities as an undifferentiated terrain producing, at best, lectures, and she names the resulting "frame spillover" by which anxieties about the English major bleed into a verdict on close reading itself. Her charge that the decline narrative amounts to "a species of disinformation, or even gaslighting" is strong language from a famously measured critic, and she earns most of it, noting the standing irony of The New Yorker announcing the end of the English major in the same issue that runs long-form historical essays written by English majors.

The second half stages her promised encounter between normative critical theory and the current humanities. Using Benhabib's distinction between the explanatory-diagnostic and the anticipatory-utopian, and Honneth's between moral-anthropological and historical-teleological accounts, she maps the field's live conflict: the method debates (surface reading, postcritique, Kramnick and Clune on method and judgment) against the urgent-topics scholarship on anti-blackness, indigeneity, climate, and democratic erosion. The mapping genuinely illuminates. Her observation that the method debates have mostly produced meta-discussion about the method debates, rather than transformed practice, is the kind of dry, accurate verdict the field rarely delivers about itself. But her professed neutrality has costs. Anderson announces that she will model "value-clarification" and critical pluralism rather than adjudicate, and she keeps her word so faithfully that the essay ends by clarifying a conflict it visibly has views about. Her liberalism is, as she admits, legible throughout. A reader may reasonably wish she had argued for it rather than merely disclosed it, since the Frankfurt School apparatus she deploys was built for judgment, not taxonomy.

The argument between the essays #

The book's real subject emerges between the covers rather than inside either essay, and here I return to my thesis. During thinks the object "the humanities" survives the withering of its academic half; Anderson thinks the generalized object is the problem and the academic disciplines are the thing worth saving. These positions are not complementary emphases; they are rival ontologies, and the closing interview, though cordial, does not resolve them. Nor do the authors quite engage each other's strongest points. Anderson's frame-spillover analysis would predict exactly the discursive conditions under which During's extramural humanities flourish while the academic ones starve, since a public taught that humanities research has "lower epistemic status than STEM" will happily consume its popularized products without funding its production. During's world-picture, conversely, would complicate Anderson's rescue of disciplinary substance, since the disciplines she defends were themselves consolidated recently, in the 1930s, as the series introduction concedes. A longer book would have forced the collision; this one, at essay length, lets both authors state their cases and leave.

That brevity is a series constraint, not a fault of ambition, and it makes the book unusually assignable. Both essays were drafted before the second Trump administration's assault on universities became clear, as During notes in passing, which dates the empirical sections in a way neither author could help. It also gives the book an unintended poignancy: the pressures both essays analyze in the register of managerialism and enrollment data have since become cruder and faster.

Verdict #

Humanities Theory is the rare crisis-of-the-humanities book that neither mourns nor boosts, and it is the best short introduction now available to what is actually at stake in the field's self-arguments. During's essay is the more original and the more vulnerable, a genuinely new frame resting on a breezy empirical base; Anderson's is the more rigorous and the more withheld, a forensic clearing of discursive ground that stops short of building on it. In my estimation, assign them together, because each is the other's best critic, and the book's one structural flaw (that the confrontation between them happens mostly in the reader's head) is also what makes it teach so well. For a doctoral seminar in critical theory, pair Anderson's use of Benhabib and Honneth with the primary texts and let students decide whether value-clarification is a method or an evasion. The humanities world, on either account, will be arguing about this book for a while, in seminar rooms if they survive, and on substacks if they do not; the crisis of the humanities, writ large, now includes the venues in which we review its literature.