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In the 1960s, Hannah Arendt endeavored to advance a concept of judgment explicitly set against Kantian moral universalism. This chapter follows this trajectory of conceptualization in order to discern those elements that can advance us toward a theory of critical judgment. It first examines the notion of critique of power that emerges in Arendt's writing on judgment. It then assesses the capacity of her model of judgment to account for normative criticism. It argues that Arendt's notion of reflective judgment allows us to acknowledge fully the normative power of the hermeneutic dimension of shared meanings and to advance a notion of an unconstrained, open process of judging. However, it also identifies features that impede the critical capacity of her account of judgment.

In this chapter, the author discusses the need to instill in students the learning and savvy to make reasoned, informed judgments for the rest of their lives. He says that students are not ready to make competent judgments of literature and language. They do not have the equipment, the knowledge and principles, and seasoning. He recommends teaching students some literary and intellectual history; reviewing the range of literary forms; introducing them to notions of tradition and innovation, high culture and mass culture, and popular culture; and compelling them to take ideas and ideologies seriously. He believes that in the ordinary lives of adolescents today, classrooms are often the only place where it will happen.

David Wellbery charts some of the many ways in which Lessing’s Laocoon has been ‘good to think with’ among the various artistic and literary theoreticians of the twentieth century. Wellbery revises his own earlier interpretative mode: rather than see semiotics and ‘media theory’ as Lessing’s primary contribution, he suggests that the most valuable contexts of Laocoon lie in Lessing’s reflections on the nature of critical judgment, the primacy of human action, and the texture of human emotion.

This chapter presents the author's thoughts about criticism. He says that the best vehicle for criticism is not the extended monograph or the hastily written review but the literary essay, personal, reflective, attuned to an ongoing conversation. He considers the work of criticism as a juggling act, a discourse without clear borders. The critic must play the role of a double agent, balancing text and context, a sensitive grasp of form along with the social currents that help shape art. He also calls attention to the democratization of criticism represented by customer reviews of books and films on the Internet. Critical judgment increasingly resembles what we find on websites where hotels and restaurants are usefully rated by people impelled to write in or sound off. Criticism becomes a form of polling, in which we look for enlightenment from the man in the street.

This chapter examines how the Iliad promotes rational thought and continuously evokes the audience's capacity for critical moral judgment. It explains how the Iliad prompts the audience to consider the costs of Achilles' rage and the irrationality of his desire to be honored by the very people he is failing to protect. As Achilles' rage pursues its destructive path, the Iliad overtly calls attention to the capacity of stories to develop the audience's aptitude for logic and critical thought. Numerous stories throughout the epic encourage logical reasoning and critical judgment by offering models to emulate or avoid. The chapter also discusses Achilles' conviction that success in warfare is the highest form of human achievement and worthy of the highest honor.

Building on the previous chapter, the debate here turns to paratextual poetics in narrative prose fiction during the English Restoration. While mostly drawing on a broad selection of texts published between 1660 and 1710, the chapter also includes a section that discusses paratexts of major prose fictions from earlier periods, including works like Amadis of Gaul and Don Quixote. Restoration paratexts emphasised the difference between the form of the novel and the romance; between courtly and more pedestrian forms of entertainment; and between moralistic and more hedonistic forms of consumption. While Congreve’s preface to Incognita covers much of this territory, it was by no means a text of singular quality or conceptual depth. Individual sections of this chapter address the manner in which paratexts and works like Aphra Behn’s Love Letters address and define their readers and/or dedicatees; how the importance of readerly and/or critical judgment is stressed and simultaneously seen as always necessarily non-final; and the importance of situation narrative prose fiction at a specific location within the debate about invention and representation. The body of the reader is described as a contentious location that authors both evoke and resist; and this porous border is also demonstrated as existing between paratexts and the works they accompany.

Colin L. Powell spent much of his remarkable career in advisory, not command, positions. By demonstrating the qualities of an exemplary follower, a leader presents an appropriate and realistic role model for everybody within his organization. Most people in positions of organizational authority must assume complicated dual roles as follower and leader. Rare is the leadership position that is not simultaneously a position of followership. Too often, the role of follower is seen as inherently submissive, dependent, passive, and unimaginative. On the contrary, the best and most effective followers share many characteristics with successful leaders, including competence, commitment, composure, moral conduct, and independent critical judgment.

The coda juxtaposes two canonical aesthetic positions from the nineteenth century that continued to inform twentieth century views of art: Mathew Arnold’s pledge of faith in “the best that is known and thought” and Walter Pater’s exhortation to burn with a gem-like flame. These criteria provoke a crucial question: is the belief in critical judgment at odds with the criterion of intensity for intensity’s sake? I suggest that these apparently irreconcilable views became the defining traits of modernism, which sought to retain them both in agitated interplay rather than attempting a reconciliation.