On 14 January 1989, 1,000 Muslim protesters marched through the centre of Bradford, parading a copy of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses tied to a stake. Stopping in front of a police station, they set the book alight. It was an act calculated to shock and offend. But it did more than that: the burning book became an icon of Islamic rage, and a portent of a new kind [...]

There is an episode of Star Trek in which Data, the android who would be human, disobeys orders and puts at risk the life of his captain, Jean-Luc Picard, to prevent the destruction of machines he believes to be sentient. Far from being outraged, Picard congratulates Data and tells him that it is "the most human decision you ever made". In the Star Trek universe, humans are not simply physical [...]

Capitalism, Francis Fukuyama announced more than a decade ago, is the promised land at the end of history. The collapse of the Soviet Union confirmed that there was neither an alternative to the market-driven liberal democracies of the west nor a possibility of transcending capitalism. Not even the events of 11 September, which led many critics to mock the "end of history" thesis, have given Fukuyama cause to change his [...]

Traditionally, there have been two contrasting views of intellectuals. One is the romantic picture of the intellectual as outsider, devoted, in the words of the Enlightenment philosophe Condorcet, to "the tracking down of prejudices in the hiding places where the priests, the schools, the government and all long-established institutions had gathered and protected them". The intellectual's battle cry, Condorcet enthused, was "reason, tolerance, humanity".

From the other traditional viewpoint, the [...]

"Humanity is perfectible, and it moves incessantly from less good to better, from ignorance to science, from barbarism to civilisation." So claimed the Larousse French Dictionary in 1875. "Faith in the law of progress," the dictionary concluded, "is the true faith of our century."

What a different world we live in today. After the 20th century, which witnessed two world wars, a cold war, Nazism and the Holocaust, it seems, [...]

Civilisation is under threat, runs the mantra. The barbarians are not simply at the gate, but inside it, too - terrorists with bagfuls of nuclear material, or deadly toxins, just waiting to strike. As the World Health Organisation warned us, we have "to take the risk of biological warfare seriously and recognise that it might be easier than the use of other forms of potential terrorist warfare".

The warnings have [...]

''To be tolerant," Umberto Eco once wrote, "one must first set the boundaries of the intolerant." One of the ironies of our more inclusive, more diverse society is that the preservation of diversity seems increasingly to leave less room for a diversity of views. To show respect for other peoples, other cultures and other viewpoints, the argument runs, one needs to be intolerant of people whose views give offence or [...]

Novelist and orator, philosopher and cricketer, historian and revolutionary, Trotskyist and Pan-Africanist - there are few modern figures who can match the intellectual depth, cultural breadth or sheer political contrariness of Cyril Lionel Robert James. He was a lifelong Marxist, yet one with an uncommonly fierce independence of mind that expressed itself both in his rejection of conventional Marxist arguments and in his refusal to repent of his politics, even [...]

In October 1865, a local rebellion by peasantry in Jamaica was ferociously suppressed by the island's governor, Edward John Eyre. His actions generated considerable debate in Britain. Those defending his viciousness did so on the grounds not that Jamaicans were black, but that they were no different from English workers. "The negro," observed Edwin Hood, "is in Jamaica as the costermonger is in Whitechapel; he is very likely often nearly [...]

By the time you read this, children in the American state of Kansas will, with any luck, be reading The Origin of Species in their classrooms. In August 1999, the Kansas Board of Education, under pressure from creationists, removed evolution (as well as the Big Bang theory) from the school science curriculum. It took a vocal campaign by scientists and others - and the unseating of two anti- evolution members [...]