Twelve rules for life in gold capitals. There it was next to the cash register. When the barista finished making my Americano, he answered for the book. It had changed his life. He’d even tried to meet the author at a recent event in London, but tickets had sold out. I thought of Roger Scruton’s joke that the only person at the University of London who agreed with him was the tea lady—and wondered what Cambridge academics would say if they knew that, down the hall from the half-empty lecture rooms, it was Jordan Peterson who was being read and taken to heart.

Peterson’s latest book, 12 Rules for Life, is an international bestseller. His recent debate with the philosopher Sam Harris was hosted in London’s O2 Arena. And then there is the press. Dorian Lynskey wrote in The Guardian that Peterson’s “arguments are riddled with conspiracy theories and crude distortions of subjects.” Nellie Bowles seconded this in The New York Times, publishing a lengthy piece which described Peterson’s fear of Soviet “atrocities and oppression . . . though he lives here on a quiet residential street in Toronto and is quite free.” “Peterson’s nemesis,” Tabatha Southey clarified in Maclean’s, “is a conspiracy theory holding that an international cabal of Marxist academics . . . is out to destroy Western civilization.” Then, as if to manifest Peterson’s demons, there is Jacobin, which published “Jordan Peterson’s Bullshit,” by Harrison Fluss, an academic based