Allport: “I can see that Spencer is a highly controversial addition to the list, and perhaps he doesn’t fit well into a ‘harmful books’ categorization anyway, but I do think that much of the defense of him is beside the point. We’re not really arguing about whether Spencer was a good man or whether his ideas, when properly understood, were good; we’re arguing about whether their misapplication had harmful effects.”

Well. This does, at the least, raise some broad methodological questions about this list and the discussion of the Human Events list that preceded it. (Yeah, I know, this is no doubt taking things too seriously. Oh well. It seems like the point of these lists was to provoke some discussion about books and history, not to mention the specific books named, so here we go.)

I take it that if we’re talking about “harmful books,” we’re attributing the harm, in part, to the contents of the books themselves. But Spencer’s views have been widely misunderstood. Does it make sense to attribute the harm that misunderstandings of his books caused to the books themselves? Even if those misunderstandings are clearly the fault of the reader (or cocktail-party conversationalist) rather than the fault of the author? (This isn’t just about Spencer, either; it’s clearly the case for Rand, for example, and possibly for Freud too.)

The point here is not to insist that you’re doing something wrong if you say that you will count wilfully misunderstood books on the list. I want to say that you’re probably doing something wrong if you do — it seems that you’re treating the books more as historical artefacts than as, well, books. But maybe it’s not obviously wrong to do so. And if it is, there are tricky cases, such as Nietzsche in BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL — who made an appearance on the Human Events list — where the book has been gravely misunderstood, but the author seems to have intended that hasty readers would fail to understand.

The point here, rather, is that different answers to each of these questions could result in some drastically different lists. Imagine what different answers about interpretation might mean when it comes to the Bible or the Qu’ran, if you were to expand the list beyond the last couple centuries! So I’d be interested to know what Ralph (for one) was thinking about questions of interpretation and misinterpretation when he was considering which books to list as “harmful”; and I’d be interested to know if there was any one consistent answer to those questions that he was thinking of when he prepared the list.

‘Much can be discovered about a man by examining his opponents, his rivals, his “enemies”.’

Please. I have little political sympathy for any incarnation of the Republican Party after about 1870, and I disagree with Ralph Luker about a lot of things, but this is just lazy demagoguery.

Locating people’s politics by the positions of their enemies won’t get you very far towards an intelligent understanding of politics. I hear that a few years back Adolf Hitler went to war against Josef Stalin, and that Stalin went to war against Hitler. Is the fact that Hitler was his enemy any credit to Stalin? Is the fact that Stalin was his enemy any credit to Hitler?