Edward Skidelsky is senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Exeter and director of the Committee for Academic Freedom
Earlier this week at HMS President – the Royal Navy Reserve’s base on the Thames – the government’s free-speech tsar, Arif Ahmed, delivered a quiet but unmistakable warning to the higher-education sector. Academic freedom, he told an audience of academics, politicians and policymakers gathered for a conference on the future of open inquiry, could not
‘Do not judge a book by its cover’ is not a dictum that applies in the present case. Towards the Light: The Story of the Struggle for Liberty and Rights that Made the Modern West by Mr A. C. Grayling, Printed in the year 2007, sets us up for a rollicking defence of Freedom and
John Gray’s latest work brings together many themes that will be familiar to fans of this scintillatingly gloomy intellect. It denounces neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism as forms of utopianism, destined like all previous forms to shipwreck upon the hard facts of human existence. It emphasises al-Qa’eda’s roots in Western political extremism rather than Islamic tradition. It