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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 12 Rules for Life | 3/4 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12_Rules_for_Life | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T08:52:30.445868+00:00 | kb-cron |
The book was received with mixed reviews. Melanie Reid, for The Times, said the book is "aimed at teenagers, millennials and young parents...If you peel back the verbiage, the cerebral preening, you are left with a hardline self-help manual of self-reliance, good behaviour, self-betterment and individualism that probably reflects [Peterson's] childhood in rural Canada in the 1960s." Bryan Appleyard, also in The Times, describes it as "a less dense and more practical version of Maps of Meaning...a baggy, aggressive, in-your-face, get-real book that, ultimately, is an attempt to lead us back to what Peterson sees as the true, the beautiful and the good – i.e., God." Hari Kunzru of The Guardian said it collates advice from Peterson's clinical practice with anecdotes, accounts of his academic work as a psychologist and "a lot of intellectual history of the 'great books' variety", but the essays are explained in an overcomplicated style. Kunzru called Peterson sincere, but found the book irritating because he considers Peterson failed to follow his own rules. In an interview with Peterson for The Guardian, Tim Lott called the book atypical of the self-help genre. For The Scotsman, Bill Jamieson praised it as "richly illustrated and packed with excellent advice on how we can restore meaning and a sense of progression to our everyday lives", describing it as "verbal waterboarding for supporters of big government". The New York Times's David Brooks wrote, "The Peterson way is a harsh way, but it is an idealistic way – and for millions of young men, it turns out to be the perfect antidote to the cocktail of coddling and accusation in which they are raised". Joe Humphreys of The Irish Times argued people should not be stopped "from reading what is a veritable powerhouse of a book: wise, provocative, humorous and also maddeningly contradictory...". Glenn Ellmers in Claremont Review of Books wrote that Peterson "does not shrink from telling readers that life means pain and suffering. His deft exposition, however, makes clear that duty is often liberating and responsibility can be a gift". Dorothy Cummings McLean, writing for The Catholic World Report, called the book "the most thought-provoking self-help book I have read in years", with its rules reminding her of those by Bernard Lonergan, and content "serving as a bridge between Christians and non-Christians interested in the truths of human life and in resisting the lies of ideological totalitarianism". In a review for the same magazine, Bishop Robert Barron praised the archetypal reading of the story about Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden with Jesus representing "gardener" and the psychological exploration of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and The Gulag Archipelago, but did not support its "gnosticizing tendency to read Biblical religion purely psychologically and philosophically and not at all historically", or the idea that "God ... [is] simply a principle or an abstraction". It is "valuable for the beleaguered young men in our society, who need a mentor to tell them to stand up straight and act like heroes", Barron wrote. Adam DeVille took a very different view, calling 12 Rules for Life "unbearably banal, superficial, and insidious" and saying "the real danger in this book is its apologia for social Darwinism and bourgeois individualism covered over with a theological patina" and that "in a just world, this book would never have been published". Ron Dart, for The British Columbia Review, considered the book "an attempt to articulate a more meaningful order for freedom as an antidote to the erratic ... chaos of our age", but although "necessary" with exemplary advice for men and women it is "hardly a sufficient text for the tougher questions that beset us on our all too human journey and should be read as such." For the Financial Times, Julian Baggini wrote, "In headline form, most of his rules are simply timeless good sense.... The problem is that when Peterson fleshes them out, they carry more flab than meat". In The Spectator, Peter Hitchens wrote that he did not like the "conversational and accessible" style and amount of "recapitulation", but believed it had "moving moments", "good advice" with a message "aimed at people who have grown up in the post-Christian West" with special appeal to young men. Park MacDougald of New York shared a similar view, writing that on paper Peterson lacks the "coherence, emotional depth" of his lectures but "still, he produces nuggets of real insight." Pankaj Mishra's review in The New York Review of Books called 12 Rules a repackaged collection of pieties and late 19th-century Jungian mysticism that has been discredited by modern psychology. Mishra compared the book to historical authors who influenced Peterson, but whose serious moral failings, including racism and fascism, Peterson fails to address. He criticized Peterson's book for failing to recognize how traditionalism and myth can be used in support of demagoguery and anti-democratic ideas, and asserts that Peterson's work is a symptom of the problems it attempts to cure. Peterson responded to the review on Twitter, taking umbrage at Mishra's description of Peterson's friendship with First Nations artist Charles Joseph as "the latest in a long line of eggheads pretentiously but harmlessly romancing the noble savage"; Peterson responded, "If you were in my room at the moment, I'd slap you happily." For Psychology Today, philosopher Paul Thagard called the book flimsy and said Peterson's views fail to stand up to philosophical scrutiny, "If you go for Christian mythology, narrow-minded individualism, obscure metaphysics, and existentialist angst, then Jordan Peterson is the philosopher for you. But if you prefer evidence and reason, look elsewhere." Psychologist John Grohol, in PsychCentral, said the advice was sound, self-evident, and harmless, but could not recommend it because Peterson justified his advice with rambling tangential anecdotes and religious dogma instead of scientific data. In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Guy Stevenson wrote that Peterson's work is ignored by serious academics, in part because of his inflated claims targeting a conspiracy of "postmodern neo-Marxists", but that his level of celebrity had not been seen for a public intellectual since Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s. According to Stevenson, Peterson's practical advice and Jungian mysticism reflect a new counterculture movement similar to that of the 1960s. He called 12 Rules aggressive and overeager to blame problems on "bogeymen", and recommended as an alternative the work of John Gray, who has addressed the same issues. Kelefa Sanneh of The New Yorker noted: