What a Paine
But while I always found arguments over"the Russian question" to be stimulating, by contrast the need to formulate a position on"the Hitchens question" has never seemed urgent to me. The decline is sad and will probably not be reversed. The whole thing is not interesting enough for a novella by Dostoevsy, let alone a trilogy by Isaac Deutscher
Still, there are moments when something better stirs in his brain, and on the page, which is why I continue to read Hitchens occasionally, despite having no interest in chatting about him. Unfortunately it does not sound like his new book, Thomas Paine’s 'Rights of Man': A Biography is going to be on my must-read list, despite my immoderate interest in all things Paine-related.
It"reads like the work of a tired man," according to John Barrell in the new London Review of Books.
Too tired, to begin with, to check his facts. Rights of Man (not The Rights of Man, as Hitchens persistently calls it) was written as an answer to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, and Hitchens tells us that among others who wrote replies to Burke, along with Joseph Priestley and Mary Wollstonecraft, was William Godwin, which he wasn’t. He says that, unlike Paine, Wollstonecraft advocated votes for women, which she didn’t. Paine himself, Hitchens says, was not discouraged from writing Part One of Rights of Man by the rough treatment he received at the hands of a Parisian crowd following Louis XVI’s flight to Varennes. Nor should he have been, for Part One was published several months before the king fled and Paine was manhandled. According to Hitchens, Part Two was produced partly to explain to Dr Johnson the need for a written constitution, and partly to endorse Ricardo’s views on commerce and free trade, but when it was written Johnson had been dead for seven years and Ricardo, not yet 20, had published no views that required endorsing....In 1794 Paine published The Age of Reason, 'probably', thinks Hitchens, in reaction to a sermon by Richard Watson, the bishop of Llandaff, though, as Paine himself tells us, he had not heard of the sermon until it was advertised in Watson’s reply to The Age of Reason, An Apology for the Bible.
Well, that's not good. But it gets worse. When Barrell says that a copy of John Keane's biography of Paine"must have been lying open on [Hitchens's] desk as he was writing this book," it is not a trope. There are a couple of passages from Keane that appear to be cribbed, with small embellishments of style, by Hitchens. And then Barrell really moves in for the kill:
There is little sign over the course of the book that Hitchens has paid enough attention to Paine’s ideas to notice how they develop. This above all is why it seems so inert. He asks us to admire Paine simply for the sake of the positions he takes on one issue or another, as these can be summarised in a sentence or two, but no political philosopher can excite us simply by his conclusions, skimmed from the top of the arguments they develop from, any more than we can admire poems on the basis of a one-sentence summary of what they ‘say’, in isolation from the process of saying it....He does not recognise in Paine’s later development how his attempt to build a theory of government on natural rights involves (almost) freeing himself from the classical republican tradition in which he had educated himself. Hitchens treats the distinction Paine makes so much of, between ‘society’ and ‘government’, as insignificant, and thus has nothing to say about Paine’s faith in civil society: in sociable economic exchange, and in the simple pleasures of sociability, as much more efficacious than government in preserving social order.
None of this can be excused on the grounds that Hitchens is a journalist and not a scholar. That isn't a different of species. The idea that someone who writes for general-interest publications is, by definition, answerable to lower standards has a pernicious effect -- especially on professors. (I often read academic books and articles that prove far less well-researched than things appearing in the better newspapers and magazines. And let's not even get into footnote accuracy.)
At one point, Hitchens said he approached writing with the intent that everything he published ought to remain of interest well after he was dead. But I'm not sure that writing for posterity exempts you from thinking readers will be more indulgent than they ought to be.
Update:See also Dan Greene's essay"Legislating: Christopher Hitchens as a Literary Critic" (via Dan's blog The Reading Experience.)