What is cultural critique for? How can critique serve as a form of progressive social transformation? These key questions guide Joel Pfister's excellent new book. Pfister explores – and offers answers to – these questions through an analysis of cultural studies, American studies and left studies critiques mainly in the post-World War II era. Discussing scholarship, conference proceedings, and the intellectual communities of the British and American left, Pfister offers an illuminating discussion of how strategy can go beyond theoretical preoccupations to effect change. Throughout, Pfister draws usefully on his experience in the classroom and offers insights that will be rewarding for teachers of progressive critique.

Tracing the historical contours of progressive critique Pfister considers the work of Robert Lynd (the book's title gestures to Lynd's 1939 study Knowledge for What?), F. O. Mathiessen, C. Wright Mills, David Reisman, Raymond Williams, E. P. Thompson, Stuart Hall and other major left critics. Pfister observes that American cultural studies has often valued careerism over the larger political strategies guiding British criticism, but also observes “the ways in which Americans – their politics, culture, approaches to organizing – radicalized British cultural studies in new theoretical and strategic ways” and that American and British critiques “have been in mutually transformative conversations with one another for decades” (17). The result of these discussions is a rich transatlantic history of the ways in which “critical work has produced knowledge about ... acting on these ‘studies’” (3).

The book has three parts, “American Studies and Cultural Studies,” “Historical Studies and Literary Studies,” and “Beyond Critique for Critique's and Career's Sake,” each of which includes two chapters. Chapter 1 examines the Americanization of cultural studies, the emergence of a “postpolitical” US cultural studies, and its relative overemphasis on careerism compared to British cultural studies. Here Pfister challenges the positioning of American studies as a “cautionary example of an institutionalized cultural studies gone wrong” (24), a discussion that dovetails well with his later account of Mathiessen's academic activism (189–90). Chapter 2 probes how British new left critique was inspired and shaped by its opposition to American Cold War hegemony and how it informed American left criticism. Chapter 3 dissects the often fraught relationship between cultural studies and history in the wake of Althusser and Foucault and challenges the argument by some historians that American left critics lacked the radical orientation of their British counterparts. Chapter 4 addresses the limitations of “complicity critiques” – the practice of scrutinizing how texts are “complicit in the power arrangements of the dominant culture.” Drawing on Mills, Hall, Lawrence Levine, and others, Pfister calls for academics to go beyond complicity critiques and to study the “emergence, dynamics, and effects of organizing cultures,” as have Daniel Aaron, George Lipsitz, Lizabeth Cohen, and Michael Denning (139–40). Chapters 5 and 6 conclude the book with illuminating discussions of the professionalization of left studies and of how left studies might focus more effectively on “analysis, organizing, and what Stuart Hall terms ‘hegemonizing’” (213).

The scope and accessibility of the book make it potentially important not only for specialists in cultural studies, American studies, and left studies, but also for academics and teachers in the social sciences and humanities and non-academics alike who are interested in the history and future of progressive critique. Readers concerned with subjectivity will also find his discussion of the continuities between British and US cultural studies and work on the history of subjectivity to be rewarding, as will those who enjoyed Geoff Eley and Keith Neld's recent book, The Future of Class in History: What's Left of the Social?, which broached some similar concerns. Critique for What? is, in short, an exceptional intellectual history that explains why critique matters and how it can be made to matter more.