Matt Johnson on Christopher Hitchens: A Recommendation

Warning: gushing ahead

A little while ago, I spoke to my friend Matt Johnson about his soon-to-be-published book How Hitchens Can Save the Left: Rediscovering Fearless Liberalism in an Age of Counter-Enlightenment. It’s out on February 14 so I wanted to give it another plug. (I promise I haven’t been asked or paid to do this!)

Actually, I sometimes see myself as the book’s midwife. I’m sure Matt won’t mind me telling the tale publicly. I reached out to him a couple of years ago because I had stumbled upon his 2015 dissertation about Hitchens and found it interesting and insightful and I wanted to talk to him about it. I also spoke with him about my (still-gestating) Hitchens book with Pitchstone Publishing.

Anyway, at some point, Matt told me of a book proposal about Hitchens that he’d previously written up and asked if Pitchstone might be interested, despite already having my Hitchens book in the works. Since our projects are quite different in focus, and since I quite desperately wanted to read the book he had not yet written, I recommended him to Kurt Volkan at Pitchstone—and here we are, around two years later. I’m yet to birth my own book—I’m very slow—but at least I have helped to birth Matt’s.

So this isn’t a review so much as a wholehearted recommendation—as must be clear by now, I can hardly be neutral about this book. I do genuinely think it’s the first decent book about Hitchens to appear since his death (admittedly the competition isn’t exactly fierce—the calumnies of Richard Seymour, the lies and nonsense of Larry Taunton, the thin gruel of Ben Burgis…). It’s a book that takes Hitchens as a man of ideas and principles seriously, and that punctures quite a lot of the rubbish that has been written and said about him, on both left and right.

It is also an antidote to the shallowness of much of the coverage of Hitchens. For example, in 2021, around the time of the tenth anniversary of Hitchens’ death, a slew of articles appeared, most of them focusing on what one might call the aesthetics of Hitchens—and often in the most uninteresting of ways. How much more refreshing and stimulating to delve into Matt Johnson’s astute, well-written analysis! Matt restores depth to Hitchens the political writer and convincingly argues for his enduring relevance.

How Hitchens Can Save the Left is not a work of adulation, however. Matt provides some of the most penetrating critiques of Hitchens’ views I have ever read—and they are all the more convincing because he actually knows his stuff. Alongside Matt’s own fine essays, this book demonstrates that he is, in his own right, a powerful and perspicacious writer. I’ve said it before, so I’ll repeat: I’m very proud to call him a friend.

Bravo, Matt, bravo, from your friendly midwife.

I think I’ve gushed quite enough now, so let me just remind readers that How Hitchens Can Save the Left is out on February 14 and is available to pre-order now.

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