Is Jordan Peterson’s book all it’s cracked up to be?

Jordan Peterson has never been shy about dispensing advice. But has the court of the Canadian philosopher king now overreached itself? A copy of Peterson’s book ‘Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life’ sparked something of a Twitter storm yesterday, when critic James Marriott noted how a truncated form of his Times review has appeared on the back of Paterson’s book. Here’s how publishers Allen Lane quoted Marriott’s words on the book of Peterson’s paperback edition:

A philosophy of the meaning of life… the most lucid and touching prose Peterson has written.

Pretty gushing right? But here’s what Marriott’s review actually wrote in the Times in March 2021:

Peterson calls in his hero, “psychoanalyst extraordinaire” Carl Jung, whose theory of the collective unconscious proposes that myths and stories in the culture at large offer clues to universal human attributes, desires and fears. This licenses Peterson (Dan Brown-style symbologist of the western canon) to hunt down these clues to construct a philosophy of the meaning of life.