Why it’s here. An anthology succeeds when it is curated by someone who has thought deeply about the tradition it represents, who can select for quality rather than just coverage, and who writes well enough that the introductory notes are worth reading on their own terms. “The Portable Atheist” meets all three criteria. Christopher Hitchens spent his career as a polemicist and essayist who took religion as one of his central subjects, and he assembled this collection with genuine care — drawing on ancient texts, Enlightenment classics, 19th-century science, and 20th-century philosophy to trace a continuous tradition of skeptical and freethinking thought. The result is the best single-volume survey of the freethought tradition available, covering ground that no single authored book could cover, and doing so through primary texts rather than summaries.
What it offers. The selections range from Lucretius on the nature of things through Hobbes, Spinoza, Hume, James Mill, Charles Darwin, and Marx; through Madalyn Murray O’Hair, Carl Sagan, and A.J. Ayer; to Philip Larkin, Salman Rushdie, and Ian McEwan. The breadth is the point: freethought is not a school with a single doctrine but a tradition of questioning, and the anthology demonstrates this by showing how different the questions and answers have been across two and a half millennia. Hitchens’ own introductory essays for each section are characteristically sharp, well-informed, and occasionally reckless in their generalizations. His introduction to the whole volume is one of the better brief statements of what the freethinking tradition is and why it matters. Reading the anthology sequentially is a genuine education.
A word of caution. Hitchens was not a neutral anthologist, and the collection reflects his specific intellectual commitments — his particular atheism, his Orwellian anti-clericalism, his distaste for what he called “the mewling of apologists.” Some selections are chosen as much for their polemical force as for their philosophical depth, and the collection is stronger on anti-religious argument than on the constructive secular ethics that is, arguably, the more important half of the freethinking tradition. The anthology is also, inevitably, weighted toward the Western tradition; freethinking in other cultural contexts — Indian, Chinese, Islamic — is not represented. These are limitations of purpose rather than failures of execution, but they should be noted.