Terror and Liberalism, 1/7

Aaronovitch Watch (incorporating Nick Cohen Watch) recently expanded its remit to cover wider aspects of Decency. One book stands out: Paul Berman’s Terror and Liberalism, in general because it’s one of the books that the Decents cite with the greatest respect, but in particular because of the effect it appears to have had on Nick Cohen. That there’s been a remarkable shift in the direction of Nick Cohen’s journalism is frequently remarked upon. And while we can all speculate about the reasons why there might have been this shift, the most explicit statement he’s provided for us was in the Writer’s Choice column of the Normblog here, when he wrote about the effect that Berman and his book had had on him:

“He convinced me I'd wasted a great deal of time looking through the wrong end of the telescope. I was going to have to turn it round and see the world afresh.”

He drew particular attention to the book’s seductive qualities:

“Readers who want to disagree with him, as I did, are seduced because he understands why they believe what they believe and more often than not expresses their ideas better than they can.”

Now, Cohen admits he was seduced. But what if we don’t just want to disagree with Berman, but also make the slightest attempt to resist seduction? What if we take some precautions? What if we do the elementary work of checking some of the claims Berman makes against the sources he says that he’s using when he makes them? What if we try to summon up a modicum of scepticism towards his general argument, perhaps even the kind of scepticism that helped to make Nick Cohen’s Cruel Britannia quite the best book on British politics in the 1990s? How does Berman’s argument fare then?

Tracing Berman’s arguments back to his sources isn’t always easy. There’s a “Note to the Reader” at the end that lists a few of the works consulted, but Berman habitually cites books without providing page references, and that irritates. (Terror and Liberalism doesn’t have an index, either, and that also irritates.) Sometimes you don’t need to chase up his references to find fault with the book. He calls Franz Ferdinand the "grand duke of Serbia" on p.32, for example, and he’s become the "Archduke of Serbia" by p.40, when he wasn’t either; Franz Ferdinand was the Archduke of Austria, and Serbia lay outside the Habsburg lands. (Funny, though, that the errors in basic general knowledge should come to light when it comes to dealing with Serbia and Sarajevo, of all places.) But much of the rest of the time, it’s an interesting exercise to compare what Berman says with what his sources say. I haven’t done this comprehensively in what follows (even I’ve got better things to do with my time), and I’m not saying anything in what follows about the two chapters on Sayyid Qutb – because I haven’t read any of his works and don’t know much about him, apart from what Berman tells me, and, as will be clear from what follows, I don’t think Berman’s an entirely reliable source. But I have done a bit of checking around with some of the books that I’ve got to hand. How does Berman use his sources? Often carelessly, and not especially fair-mindedly, as we shall see.