On Offence: The Politics of Indignation (Richard King, Scribe)

Impeccable in its timing, Richard King’s meditation on the history of taking offence comes at a time of increasingly personal point-scoring by the major political parties as they claw it out in an election year. When I first picked up this book I wasn’t sure if there was enough material in this topic to fill over 200 pages, but King does a fine job in contextualising our growing hypersensitivity by calling on the musings of many of the Western canon’s most familiar thinkers. By illustrating his arguments with recognisable examples, he firmly situates the taking of offence as a very contemporary malaise. King’s main point is that the way in which offence-taking has become democratised in the past 50 years is bad for us culturally as it opens the door to a new mood of censoriousness, self-pity and self-righteousness, and in turn poisons public discussion and stifles intellectual rigor and debate. As an academic, I consider it my job to be both sensitive to how language can marginalise but also open to intellectual points of view that may not sit comfortably within my worldview. In On Offence, King reminds me of the particular importance of this second attribute to education. 

Rachel Wilson is a Melbourne-based media academic and former bookseller

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Category: Reviews