Edward Skidelsky

Edward Skidelsky is senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Exeter and director of the Committee for Academic Freedom

Tuesday

Edward Skidelsky

The woke wars intensify

From our UK edition

Nigel Biggar was not an obvious target for cancellation. A New Labourite, a Remainer and a public supporter of gay marriage and abortion up to 18 weeks, he might have seemed almost right-on – for an Oxford Professor of Divinity, at any rate. Nonetheless, when in 2017 he had the temerity to suggest that the British Empire had done some good as well as bad, 170-plus academics signed a letter urging Oxford University to withdraw support for his work. This was one of the first stirrings of ‘cancel culture’, the tactic of quashing wrongthink not by argument or persuasion but by sheer force of numbers.   Unfortunately for themselves, Biggar’s detractors had picked on the proverbial ‘wrong guy’.

Friday

Edward Skidelsky

The battle for free speech in universities has only just begun

From our UK edition

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 be regarded as secure merely because Parliament had legislated for it. It felt oddly appropriate that the message was delivered on the famous Tideway, just ‘downstream’ of Whitehall. At Durham University, ajob advert posted this month still contains requirements that appear to breach the new guidance At first glance, his claim might sound counter-intuitive.

Saturday

Edward Skidelsky

A march that has lost momentum

From our UK edition

‘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 Enlightenment in the style of Tom Paine or William Godwin. And that is exactly what we get. This is the story of modern Europe as told by a 19th-century liberal secularist, updated but not fundamentally rethought.

Saturday

Edward Skidelsky

Faith in the future

From our UK edition

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 envisages a world in which history, far from coming to an end, has resumed its usual bloody course against a background of dwindling oil resources and proliferating weaponry. And it insists that our only escape from this miserable farrago lies in the company of ‘mystics, poets and pleasure-lovers’. All this is vintage Gray.