Few works of political reflection are as intrepid as Harry Clor's 1969 classic Obscenity and Public Morality. Clor, teacher and scholar, who died in 2018, wrote the book with a sense that the sexual revolution and the rights revolution underway at that time challenged those who would defend a civilized public morality. He knew that liberal democracy's perennial dispute between personal freedom, public morality, and the law would never die and that public morality needed a defense. Never having met the man, I write this as an appreciation of his work and career.
Even his intellectual opponents recognized the depth of Clor's treatment of these issues. Charles Rembar, the chief litigant in the effort to deregulate obscenity and author of The End of Obscenity (1968), thought Clor's "the best pro-censorship book." Clor's book was written after the fashion of Aristotle: beginning with the common opinions of the matter and deepening them through a discursive confrontation with facts and arguments and concluding, philosophically, with modest judgments suited to the nature of things. Neither alarmist, libertarian, moralist, nor dogmatist, Clor presents a thorough argument, which makes the book less than accessible to the rushed or casual reader, but manifestly inspiring to those interested in thinking.
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