While this book is a study of public and civic criticism, it was born from a curiosity regarding critical thinking as a social phenomenon.

During the first decade of the new millennium, goals of critical thinking have been increasingly prominent in US educational institutions. Miami University of Ohio, for instance, has prominently featured critical thinking as a principle of its Miami Plan for Liberal Education. As of 2006 the SUNY system required that students meet a basic competency in critical thinking. As a graduate-student instructor in anthropology at the University of Michigan, I took a workshop on encouraging critical thinking, just a few years after the College of Arts and Sciences had prompted faculty to address critical thinking in their syllabi. Employees of any US college or university could perform a search of their institution's website and likely find numerous documents claiming to address it. Much as literary theorist Michael Warner has noted a popular consensus on the virtues of critical reading, we might ask: what isn't there to like about critical thinking?

Before I started teaching college students full-time in the United States, perhaps it was easier for me to miss such rhetoric. Yet before I began to hear and see it in the United States, from 1999 to 2001 I heard it and saw it used to describe a widespread social problem in post-Communist Slovakia, where I was conducting research.