Theodore Dalrymple is among the English-speaking world’s most insightful social critics. For decades, he has written about the pathologies that have ruined our cities and resigned entire neighborhoods to the antagonist world of the state of nature. While those in the commanding heights of culture and politics have not always heeded his prescriptions—see, for example, the Trump administration’s shortsighted First Step Act or the anti-policing mania on the Left—Dalrymple’s warnings about a culture of irresponsibility have proven prophetic.
Among his most important works is the 2001 book, now out in a new twenty-fifth anniversary edition. Drawing on his experience as a physician and psychiatrist in some of the most blighted slums of our society, Dalrymple argues that the West is facing a crisis of personal responsibility rooted in the determinist ideology that has infected the elite. As he writes in the book’s original introduction, “In the modern world, bad ideas and their consequences cannot be confined to a ghetto.”
One striking thing about Dalrymple’s work is its profound empathy. “In the course of my work over fifteen years, I spoke to thousands of people about their lives and the lives of the people around them,” he writes in the new preface. “As a result, I could not conceive of them as simply vectors of abstract social forces acting upon them.” A doctor treats persons, not statistics, human beings with real agency and life stories. Yet Dalrymple does not let his empathy calcify into excuses for their poor decisions. As much as he acknowledges how the “system” has failed his patients, he maintains that criminals bear ultimate responsibility for their crimes.
Armed with this experience, Dalrymple argues that modern liberalism’s great error is its social determinism. “The very form of the explanation offered by liberals for modern crime—from social conditions direct to behavior, without passing through the human mind—offers those who commit crime an excuse in advance,” he writes. The social scientists who attribute crime to poverty or inequality are in fact guilty of dehumanizing the very people they claim to want to help. By attributing social dysfunction to grand, sweeping trends outside of the control of any individual, they deny the impoverished a path out of squalor and delinquency.
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