When I heard that Rauch was revisiting these topics in a new, more expansive work due out this summer, I pre-ordered the book and spent the next four months devouring any articles or podcasts the man did to promote it. I have written before about his monumental and towering 1993 book, Kindly Inquisitors, possibly the most illuminating analysis I have ever read about contemporary liberal society, and surely the best argument for free speech and debate written since the mid-19th century.
He is a tireless advocate of identity politics *and* the most articulate defender of unfettered free speech this side of John Stuart Mill. Forged in the fires of the Gay Rights Movement, of which he has been an integral part since the 1980s, Rauch is an astute critic of both the Status Quo and of the Resistance.
He is a unique synthesis: a heterodox thinker who challenges convention, a classical liberal grounded in tradition, just enough of an academic to be meaningful, and just enough of a professional journalist to be clarifying. Why? First let’s start with the fact that the man is, quite simply, a genius. Any time Jonathan Rauch has a new book, I preorder it.
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