The Islamist, by Ed Husain
Critiques of Hizb ut-Tahrir focus less on its dodgy politics than on its intellectualism. But what’s wrong with a devotion to the debate of ideas? Continue reading “In defence of ‘radicalisation’”
Articles
The Threat to Reason: How the Enlightenment was hijacked and how we can reclaim it, by Dan Hind (Verso 2007)
Taking Liberties (2007), directed by Chris Atkins
Continue reading “The erosion of civil liberties under New Labour”
The politics of belief in the 21st century
The Trap: What Happened to our Dream of Freedom?, by Adam Curtis (first shown on BBC2, March 2007)
The audience new music needs
Continue reading “D’you wanna be in my gang, my gang, my gang?”
Why? What happens when people give reasons… and why, by Charles Tilly (Princeton University Press 2006)
Freedom of speech is not a celebrated cause in the West today. While all right-thinking people are concerned about state censorship in China, or the imprisoning of poets by authoritarian regimes across the world, it seems self-indulgent or even hysterical to complain about ‘censorship’ in the liberal West. Consequently, the demand for free speech is often seen as pedantic, eccentric even, the preserve of right-wing social inadequates who like to go on about ‘political correctness gone mad’ or occasionally left-wing social inadequates who like to announce that democracy is being overthrown by neocon conspirators. Continue reading “Free speech is more than a slogan”
Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain, by Stefan Collini (Oxford University Press 2006) Continue reading “Intellectuals: alive and well and going nowhere”
In a documentary made a couple of years before his death, the celebrated philosopher Jacques Derrida was asked whether he had read all the books in his library. Continue reading “Thinking outside the text”
Dolan Cummings 