I’m saddened to write that the great essayist and
writer Christopher Hitchens is dead at
the age of 62. He had been weakened by the cancer of the
esophagus that he disclosed publicly in 2010 and the treatments he
had undertaken to fight his illness. Reason extends its condolences
to his wife, family, and friends.

As is clear to anyone who has read even a sentence of his
staggeringly prolific output, Hitchens was the sort of stylist who
could turn even a casual digression into a tutorial on all aspects
of history, literature, and art. As a writer, you gaze upon his
words and despair because there’s just no way you’re going to touch
that. But far more important than the wit and panache and erudition
with which he expressed himself was the method through which
he engaged the world.

Throughout his life, he remained a man of the left, but he had
no patience for orthodoxy and groupthink (the first night I met him
in person, we ended up bonding over a softness for the early Oliver
Cromwell, of all people). Not surprisingly, his biggest rows came
among his political and ideological compatriots. A devout atheist,
he abjured abortion and was no fan of Martin Luther King, Jr. He
made a huge break with the supporters of Bill and Hillary Clinton
in the book-length indictment No One
Left to Lie To: The Values of the Worst Family. In the years
leading up to but especially in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, he
had nothing but righteous contempt for those he perceived as soft
on religious terrorism and ended up leaving his longtime perch at
The Nation partly as a result.

It’s easy to mistake his thoroughgoing iconoclasm – this is the
guy, after all, who wrote jeremiads against Henry Kissinger and
Mother Theresa – for a reflexive, even juvenile cynicism,
but there was far more than that going on. Whether the target of
his scorn was much-beloved (he thought Gandhi a great villain for
the way he lionized poverty and preindustrial living practices) or
thoroughly hated by the wide world (Saddam Hussein, for one),
Hitchens was never a cheap-shot artist.

Rather, his positions, attitude, even his jokes stemmed from
what can only be recognized as a great Enlightenment belief in
Progress with a capital P, rational debate, and the great
marketplace of ideas. While I don’t share his contempt for religion
(he was puzzled by my “apatheism,” or indifference to the whole
matter), his stance grew out of his conviction that some methods of
thought were more advanced and liberatory than others. But because
he was committed to rational and public discourse (however caustic
at times), you could always argue with him. Which is exactly as
things should be. I didn’t always agree with him (his positions on
the invasion of Iraq, for instance, and his admiration of the awful
I.F. Stone leave me scratching my head) and he certainly wasn’t
infallible. But he was a true public intellectual, giving better
than he got, sure, but always up for conversation large and
small.

Sometime last night, upon hearing the news of Hitchens’ death,
Matt Welch tweeted that
he was “a startingly generous man in person,” which is an
understatement if anything. Hitchens was especially generous to
Reason over the years. A few months before the 9/11 attacks, we had
an intern call him to do a short interview about his forthcoming
book Letters to a Young Contrarian. The conversation
extended into a couple of hours and was the basis of a
long-form interview that is still fascinating to read. It
presaged his break with much of the left that would come after the
9/11 attacks and shows that Hitchens was not simply a contrarian
but a serious thinker who was constantly rechecking his math:

Karl Marx was possibly the consummate anti-statist in his
original writings and believed that the state was not the solution
to social problems, but the outcome of them, the forcible
resolution in favor of one ruling group. He thought that if you
could give a name to utopia, it was the withering away of the
state. Certainly those words had a big effect on me.

The reason why people tend to forget them, or the left has a
tendency to forget them in practice, has something to do with the
realm of necessity. If you make your priority — let’s call it the
1930s — the end of massive unemployment, which was then defined as
one of the leading problems, there seemed no way to do it except by
a program of public works. And, indeed, the fascist governments in
Europe drew exactly the same conclusion at exactly the same time as
Roosevelt did, and as, actually, the British Tories did not. But
not because the Tories had a better idea of what to do about it.
They actually favored unemployment as a means of disciplining the
labor market.

You see what I mean: Right away, one’s in an argument, and
there’s really nothing to do with utopia at all. And then temporary
expedients become dogma very quickly — especially if they seem to
work….

Marx’s original insight about capitalism was that it was the
most revolutionary and creative force ever to appear in human
history. And though it brought with it enormous attendant dangers,
[the revolutionary nature] was the first thing to recognize about
it. That is actually what the Manifesto is all
about. As far as I know, no better summary of the beauty of capital
has ever been written. You sort of know it’s true, and yet it can’t
be, because it doesn’t compute in the way we’re taught to think.
Any more than it computes, for example, that Marx and Engels
thought that America was the great country of freedom and
revolution and Russia was the great country of tyranny and
backwardness.

But that’s exactly what they did think, and you can still
astonish people at dinner parties by saying that. To me it’s as
true as knowing my own middle name. Imagine what it is to live in a
culture where people’s first instinct when you say it is to laugh.
Or to look bewildered. But that’s the nearest I’ve come to stating
not just what I believe, but everything I ever have believed, all
in one girth.

Hitchens spoke at several Reason events over the year, submitted
to more interviews, wrote the occasional piece for us, and offered
up unsolicited praise of the magazine under the editorship of
Virginia Postrel (“I get more out of
reading the libertarian magazine Reason than I do out of many
‘movement’ journals'”). He graciously wrote an intro to the 2004
anthology of Reason, Choice, arguing in part

It is useful and encouraging to have a magazine that approaches
matters with an additional dash of hedonism. Freedom might be more
efficient, but it also might possibly be more
enjoyable….I find that Reason keeps my own arteries from
hardening or from flooding with adrenaline out of sheer irritation,
because in the face of arbitrary power and flock-like conformism it
continues to ask, in a polite but firm tone of voice, not only
“why?” but “why not?”

If Reason helped keep Hitch’s blood pumping hot
for even a minute, that’s something we’re extremely proud of. And
we’re extremely grateful for the shelf of books he gave us all to
pore over for years to come, and the example of how to move through
the worlds of culture, politics, and ideas with an inspiring
combination of grace, fun, and seriousness.

In 2003, Hitchens participated in the symposium “Forcing
Freedom: Can liberalism be spread at gunpoint?“