This is a small book with a specific form: a series of letters addressed to a hypothetical young correspondent who has written to ask how one lives as a dissenter. It was commissioned for a series on mentorship, consciously echoing Rilke’s letters to a young poet, and Hitchens uses the format to do something he rarely did elsewhere — set out the working principles behind a career spent arguing, rather than simply arguing again. It appeared in 2001, before the split with much of the left over Iraq that would define his final decade, and it reads now as both a statement of method and an unintended prologue to that break.
What it’s about
Hitchens is trying to describe a disposition rather than a politics. He is careful, early on, to disown the word “contrarian” as his own choice: he has no interest in reflexive opposition, which he regards as just as lazy as reflexive agreement and considerably more tiresome. What he is after is the habit of independent judgement — reaching your own conclusion by your own route, and then being willing to hold it when the room disagrees.
The animating concern is what consensus does to thought. His claim is that the real pressure on intellectual honesty comes not from censorship but from the ordinary human desire to remain in good standing with one’s colleagues, party or tribe. Comfortable agreement erodes the capacity to notice when a position has stopped being defensible. The remedy he proposes is unglamorous: check the evidence yourself, be suspicious of any argument that arrives with a moral guarantee attached, and treat your own side’s claims with the scepticism you apply to your opponents’.
He also insists that dissent is not a posture of permanent misery. Much of the book is about the pleasures of the position — argument, reading, wit, the company of the awkward — and about the courage of specific individuals he admires, from Zola on the Dreyfus affair to Václav Havel and the dissidents of the Eastern bloc, whom he uses as demonstrations rather than mascots.
Key ideas
- Independence is a method, not a stance. The point is not to disagree, but to arrive at your views by inspection rather than affiliation. Automatic opposition is simply conformity with the sign reversed.
- Consensus is the real danger. Hitchens treats the desire to belong as the main corrosive force on honest thinking, more effective than any official suppression.
- Distrust the argument that flatters you. Positions that come with built-in moral reassurance deserve extra scrutiny, particularly when they are held by people you like.
- Irony as intellectual equipment. He treats humour and irony as defences against dogma — the totalitarian temperament is characteristically humourless, and that is diagnostic.
- Individuals matter. His historical examples emphasise that decisive stands are usually taken by particular people at particular moments, often at real personal cost, rather than by movements.
- Accept the isolation. He is honest that the position costs you allies and comfort, and that anyone attracted to it for the romance of martyrdom has misunderstood the job.
Who it’s for
This is for someone in their late teens or twenties working out how to think for themselves, and for anyone who enjoys watching a first-rate polemicist explain his own craft. It is short, quotable and genuinely bracing on the difference between thinking and belonging. The obvious criticism is that it is more a temperament than a philosophy: Hitchens offers little guidance on how to tell principled dissent from stubbornness, which is precisely the distinction a young reader most needs. His later positions, particularly on Iraq, have been read by critics as evidence of that gap. There is also a self-regard running through it that some find charming and others insufferable. Read it as a provocation to check your own reasoning, not as an instruction manual for being right.