The Suppression of Open Debate: The Case of Christopher Hitchens

The book, Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left, published in June 2008 by New York University Press, is a collection of Hitchens's most incisive and controversial writings on the war on terror, the war in Iraq, and the Left, and includes a selection of his quarrels with some of his former comrades. Here, Cottee and Cushman examine how the left-leaning Anglo-American intellectuals tried to derail the publication of a book about Christoper Hitchens and his bitter and well-publicized break with the Left. They think that the cultural construction of Hitchens as a lowly apostate and a tarnished heretic would make an excellent case-study for thinking about the Left and its rituals of denunciation and purification.