Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought

by Jonathan Rauch

Book Overview

Tracing attacks on free speech from Plato's Republic to America's campuses and newsrooms, Jonathan Rauch provides an engaging and provocative attack on those who would limit free thought by restricting free speech. Rauch explores how the system for producing knowledge works in a liberal society, and why it has now become the object of a powerful ideological attack. Moving beyond the First Amendment, he defends the morality, rather than the legality,...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226705757
• ISBN13: 9780226705750
• Release Date: April 1993
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 187 Pages
• Weight: 0.77 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Well-written

An excellent book on the value of open inquiry and the threats it faces. I would also recommend Carl Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World" for a related perspective on scientific vs. unscientific reasoning.

Stunning, compelling, and important

This book is superb. A well-written, exhaustively researched treatise on the philosophy of "liberal science" and a look at the attacks made on that philosophy by (mostly) well-meaning advocates of inclusion, equality, and civil discourse.I'm somewhat at a loss to try and describe how important I think this book is. I rarely comment on books I've ordered, but I feel that EVERY educated person should read this book and understand the reasons why an open, critical, unfettered exchange of ideas is of central importance to civilization and to the progress of human knowledge.Read this book. You'll be glad you did.

A must-read

For all those who think that the demands of "creation-sciencists" merely for an equal hearing with evolutionary theorists in science class are fair and reasonable, for all those who believe that people who say offensive and hurtful things in universities and elsewhere deserve to be silenced for the common good, or for all those who are convinced that potentially destructive and divisive ideas (such as homophobia, sexism or Holocaust-denial) should be surpressed to make our society more civil and inclusive, this book is for you. For it will show you, lucidly and elegantly, why you are wrong. Our way forward is through what Rauch calls the "liberal scientific" enterprise, the greatest gift of the Enlightenment, not through demands for the excision or surpression of what many consider dangerous or offensive ideas. That, Rauch, shows is the shortcut from modern democracy to a sort of middle-age regulated despotism. The ideas are stimulating in the extreme, the writing exemplary in its clarity, passion and lucidity, and the message about as important as you can get. A must-read, especially for anyone living or working in a university environment.