Review: The Assault on Reason

Published date01 September 2008
Date01 September 2008
AuthorGil Troy
DOI10.1177/002070200806300321
Subject MatterReview
| International Journal | Summer 2008 | 769 |
Reviews
THE ASSAULT ON REASON
Al Gore
New York: Penguin Press, 2007. 308pp, $32.50 cloth (ISBN 978-1-59420-122-6)
The Assault on Reason
—“the” is italicized for emphasis on the front cover—
is a polemic masquerading as a thoughtful book. Al Gore effectively identi-
fies many of the threats to Americans’ historic commitment to rational
discourse. At his best, his wide-ranging, thought-provoking analysis updates
and reinforces the founding fathers’ venerable works with cutting-edge neu-
rological and psychological research. Unfortunately, embedded in this timely,
important, substantive critique is a trendy, banal, and predictable attack on
George W. Bush’s administration. One need not be a Bush apologist to be
disappointed by this descent from a lofty philosophical and scientific plane
to more pedestrian and personal political terrain.
“Our democracy is in danger of being hollowed out,” the former vice
president and recent Nobel peace prizewinner warns, in the introduction to
this short, crisp, well-organized book (10). Burnishing his credentials as the
ultimate Harvard man, Gore mixes the worlds of scholarship and politics, the
theoretical and the practical, explaining complicated intellectual ideas in eas-
ily digestible prose. His argument is accessible without being simplistic. He
begins by looking at the web of connections linking the “printed word, rea-
son, and democracy” (11). Seeking the philosophical and technological pre-
conditions that created American politics, Gore proclaims, “the age of print

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