It has come as a surprise to me that quite a number of the reviewers of my book The Inertia of Fear and the Scientific Worldview (Columbia University Press, 1981) classify my views as “nonliberal” and inconsonant with pluralistic democracy. “Like Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose disdain for parliamentary democracy is well documented,” contends Joshua Rubenstein in The New Republic. “Turchin's ideas reflect a fundamental distrust of conventional politics.” Says David Paul Rebovich in Worldview: “While he advocates democratic rights, he has little affection for Western-style liberalism.” And Michael Scammell asserts quite unequivocally in the London Times that “Turchin…disagrees with political pluralism.”