Thanks to the recent discovery and translations of the dominant schools of liberal thought in the Anglo-American world, as found in the works of Isaiah Berlin, John Rawls and Karl Popper, and an appreciation of older liberal traditions (Kantian, Millian or Lockean), a new trend of liberalism has appeared among the younger generation of Iranian intellectuals.
Like Eriksen, Louis Menand, writing for The New Yorker, also claimed that Pinker's arguments constituted a strawman fallacy, stating "many pages of 'The Blank Slate' are devoted to bashing away at the Lockean-Rousseauian-Cartesian scarecrow that Pinker has created."