“If my books appear oversimplified, then you shouldn’t read them.” Malcolm Gladwell’s invitation to avoid reading his books, made recently in an interview in The Guardian, has a certain charm. He conveys the impression of a writer who, aware of critics who accuse him of cherry-picking the results of complex academic research to support simple-minded stories, defiantly insists on his right to do something different—to write in what he has described, in a riposte to one of his critics, as “the genre of what might be called ‘intellectual adventure stories.’ ” If his books do not display the intellectual rigor that is supposed to attach to academic writings, Gladwell seems to be suggesting, it is because they serve a different purpose. Interweaving academic research with real-life stories, Gladwell aims—as he puts it—“to get people to look at the world a little differently.” Using the power of a storyteller, he is bringing “the amazing worlds of psychology and sociology to a broader audience,” an exercise that is capable of producing nothing less than a shift in the worldview of his readers.

No one can doubt Gladwell’s ability to reach large audiences. The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers were all tremendous best-sellers, leading some to conclude that Gladwell has invented a new genre of popular writing. In David and Goliath, Gladwell again applies the formula that has been so successful in the past. Deploying a mixture of affecting narratives of struggle against the odds with carefully chosen academic papers, he contends that the powerless are more powerful than those who appear to wield much of the power in the world. To many, this may appear counterintuitive, he suggests; but by marshaling a variety of historical examples ranging from the American struggle for civil rights to the Troubles in Northern Ireland, leavened with homely tales of the trials and triumphs of basketball teams and fortified with forays into sociology and psychology, Gladwell thinks that he can persuade the reader to accept the difficult truth that the weak are not as weak as the reader imagines. If they play their cards right, they can prevail against the strong.

Why this should be thought a difficult view to accept is unclear. There is nothing remotely challenging, for most of Gladwell’s readers, in this story; it is the sort of uplift in which they already believe. The dominant narrative for the last three centuries has been one in which the power of elites and rulers is progressively overcome by the moral force of the common man and woman who sticks up for what is right. Far from being a forbidden truth, this is what everyone thinks. Here we can glimpse one of the secrets of Gladwell’s success. Pretending to present daringly counterintuitive views to his readers, he actually strengthens the hold on them of a view of things that they have long taken for granted. This is, perhaps, the essence of the genre that Gladwell has pioneered: while reinforcing beliefs that everyone avows, he evokes in the reader a satisfying sensation of intellectual non-conformity.

“Gladwell evokes in the reader a satisfying sensation of intellectual non-conformity.”

One of the features of Gladwell’s genre is a repeated effort to back the stories he tells with evidence from academic sources—a move that has attracted some of the most virulent attacks on his work. Yet Gladwell has more in common with his academic critics than either he or they realize, or care to admit. Academic writing is rarely a pursuit of unpopular truths; much of the time it is an attempt to bolster prevailing orthodoxies and shore up widely felt but ill-founded hopes. There are many examples of academics who have distorted fact or disregarded evidence in order to tell an edifying tale that accords with respectable hopes.

Consider the celebrated Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb. When they published Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? in 1935, they were not applying rigorous methods of sociological research; they were reiterating the idle prejudices and fantasies that shaped opinion throughout much of the Western world at the time. When, in later editions of the book published in 1941 and 1944, they removed the question mark from its title, they were displaying a confidence that reflected the pro-Soviet mood that prevailed in Britain during World War II and its immediate aftermath, rather than any new findings. Nor were the Webbs at all unusual in forming their theories on the basis of political fads and ephemeral moods. From the 1950s and 1960s onward, a school of sociology developed that promoted “convergence theory”—the notion that the former Soviet Union, along with other advanced industrial societies, would eventually adopt the core institutions of Western liberal democracy. (Francis Fukuyama’s “end-of-history” thesis was an apocalyptic version of this theory.) There was never compelling evidence of any strong trend to this effect, and the upshot in Russia has been altogether different. Of course this has not prevented similar theories being invoked today and applied to China and the Middle East. Appealing to the desire for security from conflict and the urge to believe that our place in the world is underwritten by history, the fantasy that societies everywhere are slowly becoming more like our own shapes the social sciences as much as it has ever done.