Books in Brief

Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought, by Jonathan Rauch (Chicago, 178 pp., $17.95)

THE RECENT attempt at thought control at the University of Pennsylvania highlights the acute importance of Mr. Rauch’s new book. Rauch asks the intriguing question: How does our society sort truth from falsehood? “Checking each by each through public criticism is the only legitimate way to decide who is right,” he writes. Public critical discourse produces knowledge while at the same time peacefully managing conflicts of beliefs. Knowledge production encompasses everything from physics to journalism and rests on two core principles: “No one gets the final say,” and “No one has personal authority.” Nowadays, public truthseeking is under fierce attack. Egalitarians argue that no set of beliefs should be more privileged than any other—producing the fights over so-called “creation science” and “Afrocentric history.” Humanitarians insist that hurtful language should be forbidden on the paradoxical grounds that it inhibits truly free speech—producing university speech codes like that at Penn. And fundamentalists demand that the heterodox be silenced—as in the infamous case of Salman Rushdie and his Iranian critics. “The new sensitivity is the old authoritarianism in disguise, and it is just as noxious,” concludes Rauch. Kindly Inquisitors is a brilliant counterattack in the war against free speech. —Ronald Bailey

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Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought, by Jonathan Rauch (Chicago, 178 pp., $17.95)

THE RECENT attempt at thought control at the University of Pennsylvania highlights the acute importance of Mr. Rauch’s new book. Rauch asks the intriguing question: How does our society sort truth from falsehood? “Checking each by each through public criticism is the only legitimate way to decide who is right,” he writes. Public critical discourse produces knowledge while at the same time peacefully managing conflicts of beliefs. Knowledge production encompasses everything from physics to journalism and rests on two core principles: “No one gets the final say,” and “No one has personal authority.” Nowadays, public truthseeking is under fierce attack. Egalitarians argue that no set of beliefs should be more privileged than any other—producing the fights over so-called “creation science” and “Afrocentric history.” Humanitarians insist that hurtful language should be forbidden on the paradoxical grounds that it inhibits truly free speech—producing university speech codes like that at Penn. And fundamentalists demand that the heterodox be silenced—as in the infamous case of Salman Rushdie and his Iranian critics. “The new sensitivity is the old authoritarianism in disguise, and it is just as noxious,” concludes Rauch. Kindly Inquisitors is a brilliant counterattack in the war against free speech. —Ronald Bailey