Constable signs Doyle’s fiery exploration of social justice

Little, Brown imprint Constable has signed political commentator and satirist Andrew Doyle’s “eloquent yet fiery exploration of our current cultural climate”, The New Puritans.

Andreas Campomar, publisher, acquired world rights from Matthew Hamilton at The Hamilton Agency. The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World will be published on 8th September 2022. 

The publisher said: “In The New Puritans, Andrew Doyle powerfully examines the underlying belief systems of this ideology, and how it has risen so rapidly to dominate all major political, cultural and corporate institutions. He reasons that to move forward we need to understand where these new puritans came from and what they hope to achieve.”

It continues that in leading a cultural revolution driven by identity politics and “social justice”, the new puritanism movement is best understood as a religion – one that makes grand claims to moral purity and tolerates no dissent. “Its disciples even have their own language, rituals and a determination to root out sinners through what has become known as ‘cancel culture’,” the synopsis states.

For Doyle, the culture war has often been dismissed as the niche concerns of a handful of students and trolls on the internet. He said: “Now it has exploded into the mainstream, people are waking up to its significance and how culture warriors threaten to destabilise the liberal values on which our society depends.

“I have been writing on this subject for many years, but am doing so now in a changed world, one in which evidence of my claims is everywhere. In The New Puritans, I offer an accessible overview of the aims of these cultural revolutionaries and how we might effectively resist them. If we don’t take a stand now, the progress we have made since the civil rights movements of the 1960s could well be reversed.”

Campomar said the book was written in the spirit “of understanding and optimism". He said: “If ever a persuasive argument were needed for the reinstatement of liberal values, then this book is it.”