In the 20th century, the role of expertise in public life has developed in tandem with the growth of the research university. As disciplines in the sciences and humanities began to adhere more tightly to the specialized knowledge associated with their respective fields, the quality of research produced by each grew more and more internal to disciplinary criteria. Accordingly, the gulf between field expertise and the general reading public began to widen (see Resources).
Thomas Bender locates the origin of this in the decline of the classical curriculum in the social sciences, a shift that "signaled the exhaustion of the humanist ideal of a common civic culture." As early as 1890, students were starting to be trained as academics in disciplinary communities rather than as civic leaders.
For Bender, this marked the beginning of a slackening public culture in the United States, an anxiety that repeatedly surfaces today in fears about the widening gap between scholarship and social life. The academic appropriation of expertise, according to the logic of such "fall" narratives, hastened the decline of the general public.
There are, of course, various types of expert. In the 19th century, men of letters such as Matthew Arnold, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin ranged freely over several intellectual fields and spoke authoritatively on any number topics. In 1864, Arnold famously defined the function of criticism as "the free play of the mind on all subjects, for its own sake," a striking formulation in contrast to our discipline-specific notions of expertise in the 21st century.
In "The Conditions of Criticism" (1991), Ian Small argues that the latter half of the 19th century endured a crisis in intellectual authority. Criticism, in Arnold's sense, slowly became institutionalized and professionalized. Advances in science and technology, coupled with professionally-sponsored training in these new specialities, boosted the authority of expert knowledge. Consequently, the rise of experts worked to undermine the cultural authority of non-expert men of letters (see Resources).
Contrary to popular decline narratives, however, it need not be inferred from this history that the rise of academic expertise has led to the demise of popular criticism. The persistence of so-called "public" intellectuals testifies to the ability of experts from various fields to speak on general subjects and to reach non-specialized publics that transverse disciplinary barriers (see Resources).
Publications such as "The New York Review of Books," "Times Literary Supplement," "New Yorker" and "London Review of Books" speak to the educated public's hunger for intelligent, informed criticism written in a jargon-free idiom.