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Thinkers of the New Left
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Thinkers of the New Left
Cover
Author Roger Scruton
Country United Kingdom
Language English
Subject New Left
Publisher Longman
Publication date 1985
Media type Print (Hardcover and Paperback)
Pages 227
ISBN 0-582-90273-8
Thinkers of the New Left is a book by the conservative English philosopher Roger Scruton published by Longman in 1985,[1] in which the author harshly criticizes the writings of authors he considers as representative of the New Left. The book proved controversial and according to Scruton its reception damaged his academic career. Some of the material in the book appeared in reworked form in a 2015 book titled Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left.[2][3][4]
Summary[edit]
According to Scruton, he was motivated to write Thinkers of the New Left by his experiences in Czechoslovakia under the communist regime, where he worked with the Jan Hus Educational Foundation and attempted to smuggle forbidden literature into the country. Scruton was angered by what he saw as "excuses for the Gulag" made by scholars such as the historian Eric Hobsbawm.[5]
The volume is a collection of essays on fourteen authors who Scruton considers as representatives of the New Left, namely E. P. Thompson, Ronald Dworkin, Michel Foucault, R. D. Laing, Raymond Williams, Rudolf Bahro, Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Immanuel Wallerstein, Jürgen Habermas, Perry Anderson, György Lukács, John Kenneth Galbraith and Jean-Paul Sartre. Most of those had earlier appeared in the British conservative magazine The Salisbury Review then edited by Scruton;[6] only the chapter on Laing had been published in The Cambridge Review.
In addition to individual chapters on these authors, an introduction and a conclusion provide a general overview of left-wing thought and its social and political significance. Scruton argues that during the 1960s and 1970s, the thinkers he discusses helped to create an "oppositional consensus", and that due to its influence "it ceased to be respectable to defend the customs, institutions, and policy of western states". Scruton sees the New Left as the most recent expression of a force that has been prominent in politics since the beginning of the French Revolution. According to him, left-wing movements are often led by fanatics, whose rhetoric he compares to that of Maximilien Robespierre.[7]
According to Scruton, while the theories of Karl Marx "have been essentially refuted" by authors such as the sociologist Max Weber, the economists Eugen Böhm von Bawerk, Ludwig von Mises, and Friedrich Hayek, and the philosopher Karl Popper, the New Left has failed to respond to Marx's critics with "anything more persuasive than a sneer", even though the major New Left thinkers depend on the central claims of Marxism. In Scruton's view, this demonstrates that the New Left does not have "a system of rationally held beliefs", and is dependent on never questioned assumptions. Scruton praises the philosopher Leszek Kołakowski's Main Currents of Marxism (1976-1978).[8]
Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left[edit]
Most of the book's chapters were reworked by Scruton in a book titled Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left published by Bloomsbury in 2015. This new version does not include the chapters on Laing and Bahro, who Scruton believed "have nothing to say to us today",[9] but contained additional chapters on Eric Hobsbawm, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, Edward Said, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Žižek.
Reception[edit]
Thinkers of the New Left was reviewed by John Dunn in The Times Literary Supplement,[10] and Dennis O'Keeffe in Modern Age.[11]
Colin Crouch argued in The Political Quarterly[12] that Scruton often resorts to personal attacks, such as calling J.K. Galbraith a "parasite". Crouch also describes Scruton as "paranoid" with a "Manichean conservatism" which equates all criticism of the West with allegiance to the Soviets and compares dry writing styles to Stalinist crimes.
Looking back on Thinkers of the New Left in 2015, Scruton wrote that because the book was published while Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister and he, then teaching at a university, was known as a prominent opponent of the British Left, it was "greeted with derision and outrage", and its publication marked "the beginning of the end" for his university career and led to attacks on his character and on all of his works, regardless of whether they dealt with politics. According to Scruton, an academic philosopher wrote to Longman, the book's publisher, that Longman had been "tarnished by association" with Scruton's work, and one of Longman's best-selling educational writers threatened to "take his products elsewhere if the book stayed in print". Scruton writes that copies of Thinkers of the New Left were removed from bookshops as a result.[9]
The journalist Tim Adams, writes that underground copies of Thinkers of the New Left were distributed in the former Czechoslovakia after the book's withdrawal in Britain,[5] while according to Scruton, "samizdat editions" of the book appeared in both Czech and Polish, and it was subsequently translated into Chinese, Korean and Portuguese.[9] Adams describes Thinkers of the New Left as "a closely argued attack on what Scruton saw as the prevailing fundamentalism of his world, the grip of Marxist and post-Marxist thinking within Britain’s universities."[5]
Looking back on Thinkers of the New Left in 2015, Scruton wrote that because the book was published while Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister and he, then teaching at a university, was known as a prominent opponent of the British Left, it was "greeted with derision and outrage", and its publication marked "the beginning of the end" for his university career and led to attacks on his character and on all of his works, regardless of whether they dealt with politics. According to Scruton, an academic philosopher wrote to Longman, the book's publisher, that Longman had been "tarnished by association" with Scruton's work, and one of Longman's best-selling educational writers threatened to "take his products elsewhere if the book stayed in print". Scruton writes that copies of Thinkers of the New Left were removed from bookshops as a result.[9]
The journalist Tim Adams, writes that underground copies of Thinkers of the New Left were distributed in the former Czechoslovakia after the book's withdrawal in Britain,[5] while according to Scruton, "samizdat editions" of the book appeared in both Czech and Polish, and it was subsequently translated into Chinese, Korean and Portuguese.[9] Adams describes Thinkers of the New Left as "a closely argued attack on what Scruton saw as the prevailing fundamentalism of his world, the grip of Marxist and post-Marxist thinking within Britain’s universities."[5]
References[edit]
- ^ Scruton 1985, p. iv.
- ^ Publishers Weekly 2015, p. 45.
- ^ Poole 2015, pp. vii–viii.
- ^ Jacobs 2016, pp. 44–46.
- ^ Jump up to:a b c Adams 2015.
- ^ Scruton 1985, p. vii.
- ^ Scruton 1985, pp. 1–3, 10–176.
- ^ Scruton 1985, pp. 5–6.
- ^ Jump up to:a b c Scruton 2016, pp. vii–viii.
- ^ Dunn 1986, pp. 347–348.
- ^ O'Keeffe 1988, pp. 75–78.
- ^ Crouch 1986, pp. 453–455.
Bibliography[edit]Books
- Scruton, Roger (1985). Thinkers of the New Left. London: Longman. ISBN 0-582-90273-8.
- Scruton, Roger (2016). Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 978-1-4729-3595-3.Journals
- Crouch, Colin (1986). "Thinkers of the New Left (Book Review)". The Political Quarterly. 57. – via EBSCO's Academic Search Complete (subscription required)
- Dunn, John (1986). "Restoration and reversal". The Times Literary Supplement (4331). – via EBSCO's Academic Search Complete (subscription required)
- Jacobs, Alan (2016). "Roger Scruton vs. the New Left". The American Conservative. 15 (2). – via EBSCO's Academic Search Complete (subscription required)
- O'Keeffe, Dennis (1988). "On the Socialist Fantasy". Modern Age. 32 (1). – via EBSCO's Academic Search Complete (subscription required)
- "Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left". Publishers Weekly. 262 (31). 2015. – via EBSCO's Academic Search Complete (subscription required)Online articles
- Adams, Tim (4 October 2015). "Roger Scruton: 'Funnily enough, my father looked very like Jeremy Corbyn'". The Guardian. Retrieved 10 October 2015.
- Poole, Steven (10 December 2015). "Fools, Frauds and Firebrands by Roger Scruton review – a demolition of socialist intellectuals". The Guardian. Retrieved 9 November 2016.
External links[edit
]Fools, Frauds and Firebrands at the publisher's website
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Roger Scruton
Bibliography
Essays and
monographs
Kant (1982)
A Short History of Modern Philosophy (1982)
Thinkers of the New Left (1985)
Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey (1994)
How to Be a Conservative (2014)
The Soul of the World (2014)
Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition (2017)
hide
v
t
e
Roger Scruton
Bibliography
Essays and
monographs
Kant (1982)
A Short History of Modern Philosophy (1982)
Thinkers of the New Left (1985)
Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey (1994)
How to Be a Conservative (2014)
The Soul of the World (2014)
Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition (2017)
Novels
Notes from Underground (2014)
The Disappeared (2015)
Notes from Underground (2014)
The Disappeared (2015)
Other works
Violet (opera, 2005)
Why Beauty Matters (film, 2009)
Miscellaneous
Conservative Philosophy Group
The Salisbury Review
==
Violet (opera, 2005)
Why Beauty Matters (film, 2009)
Miscellaneous
Conservative Philosophy Group
The Salisbury Review
==
Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left Paperback – International Edition, 8 September 2016
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The thinkers who have been most influential on the attitudes of the New Left are examined in this study by one of the leading critics of leftist orientations in modern Western civilization. Scruton begins with a ruthless analysis of New Leftism and concludes with a critique of the key strands in its thinking. He conducts a reappraisal of such major left-wing thinkers as: E. P. Thompson, Ronald Dworkin, R. D. Laing, Jurgen Habermas, Gyorgy Lukacs, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, Slavoj Zizek, Ralph Milliband and Eric Hobsbawm. In addition to assessments of these thinkers' philosophical and political contributions, the book contains a biographical and bibliographical section summarizing their careers and most important writings.
In Thinkers of the New Left Scruton asks, what does the Left look like today and as it has evolved since 1989? He charts the transfer of grievances from the working class to women, gays and immigrants, asks what can we put in the place of radical egalitarianism, and what explains the continued dominance of antinomian attitudes in the intellectual world?
Can there be any foundation for resistance to the leftist agenda without religious faith?
Scruton's exploration of these important issues is written with skill, perception and at all times with pellucid clarity. The result is a devastating critique of modern left-wing thinking.
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Review
Eminent British philosopher and polymath Scruton gives a sharp-edged, provocative critique of leading leftist thinkers since the mid-twentieth century ... complex and erudite ― Publisher's Weekly US
Caustic, highly recherché, and simply great fun to read for the questing intellectual soul. ― Kirkus Reviews
From the standpoint of a serious conservatism, it honestly assesses the political and philosophical contributions of the Left. The book also addresses what is likely our most pressing question: 'Can there be any foundation for resistance to the leftist agenda without religious faith?' ― Catholic World Report
Since he no longer has a university career to protect, Scruton can now tweak the nose of academic leftism to his heart's content. Scruton is at his best, (and funniest) when trying to make sense of [Alain] Badiou's weird confection historical materialism and Platonic mathematical theory -- Jonathan Derbyshire ― Prospect
The book is a masterpiece ... In crisp, sometimes brilliant prose, Mr. Scruton considers scores of works in three languages, giving the reader an understanding of each thinker's overarching aim and his place within the multifaceted movement known as the New Left. He neither ridicules nor abuses the writers he considers; he patiently deconstructs them, first explaining their work in terms they themselves would recognize and then laying bare their warped assumptions and empty pretensions. -- Barton Swaim ― Wall Street Journal
I enjoyed this immensely, both for Scruton's dry, British wit as well as for the sheer breadth of intellectuals covered in his survey ― Against the Grain Blog
Highly recommended ― Powerline US Blog
Here Scruton thoroughly and fairly debunks the ostentation, obfuscation, and terrible writing and downright deceitfulness of much of postwar Marxist-inspired philosophy. For Scruton the culprits are mainly from France and Germany-beginning with Sartre and carrying through to Foucault, Habermas, Althusser, Lacan, Deleuze, Gramsci, and Said-and he carries the attack forward to Badiou and Zizek. Even Galbraith and Dworkin take a few hits. Scruton writes from the perspective of an old-school conservative. His sympathies are with the virtues of the countryside and historically rooted associations of every sort, from churches and the US Constitution to volunteer fire departments, brass bands, and the local Grange. His personal point of view could be called sentimental . but his arguments against his foes are substantial and deep. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. ― CHOICE
Scruton's exploration of these important issues is written with skill, perception and at all times with pellucid clarity. The result is a devastating critique of modern left-wing thinking.
Read less
Report an issue with this product
Product description
Review
Eminent British philosopher and polymath Scruton gives a sharp-edged, provocative critique of leading leftist thinkers since the mid-twentieth century ... complex and erudite ― Publisher's Weekly US
Caustic, highly recherché, and simply great fun to read for the questing intellectual soul. ― Kirkus Reviews
From the standpoint of a serious conservatism, it honestly assesses the political and philosophical contributions of the Left. The book also addresses what is likely our most pressing question: 'Can there be any foundation for resistance to the leftist agenda without religious faith?' ― Catholic World Report
Since he no longer has a university career to protect, Scruton can now tweak the nose of academic leftism to his heart's content. Scruton is at his best, (and funniest) when trying to make sense of [Alain] Badiou's weird confection historical materialism and Platonic mathematical theory -- Jonathan Derbyshire ― Prospect
The book is a masterpiece ... In crisp, sometimes brilliant prose, Mr. Scruton considers scores of works in three languages, giving the reader an understanding of each thinker's overarching aim and his place within the multifaceted movement known as the New Left. He neither ridicules nor abuses the writers he considers; he patiently deconstructs them, first explaining their work in terms they themselves would recognize and then laying bare their warped assumptions and empty pretensions. -- Barton Swaim ― Wall Street Journal
I enjoyed this immensely, both for Scruton's dry, British wit as well as for the sheer breadth of intellectuals covered in his survey ― Against the Grain Blog
Highly recommended ― Powerline US Blog
Here Scruton thoroughly and fairly debunks the ostentation, obfuscation, and terrible writing and downright deceitfulness of much of postwar Marxist-inspired philosophy. For Scruton the culprits are mainly from France and Germany-beginning with Sartre and carrying through to Foucault, Habermas, Althusser, Lacan, Deleuze, Gramsci, and Said-and he carries the attack forward to Badiou and Zizek. Even Galbraith and Dworkin take a few hits. Scruton writes from the perspective of an old-school conservative. His sympathies are with the virtues of the countryside and historically rooted associations of every sort, from churches and the US Constitution to volunteer fire departments, brass bands, and the local Grange. His personal point of view could be called sentimental . but his arguments against his foes are substantial and deep. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. ― CHOICE
Book Description
What does the Left look like today and how has it evolved? Is there any foundation for resistance to its agenda without religious faith?
About the Author
Sir Roger Scruton is widely seen as one of the greatest conservative thinkers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and a polymath who wrote a wide array of fiction, non-fiction and reviews. He was the author of over fifty books.
A graduate of Jesus College, Cambridge, Scruton was Professor of Aesthetics at Birkbeck College, London; University Professor at Boston University, and a visiting professor at Oxford University. He was one of the founders of the Salisbury Review, contributed regularly to The Spectator, The Times and the Daily Telegraph and was for many years wine critic for the New Statesman. Sir Roger Scruton died in January 2020.
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Product details
ASIN : 1472935950
Publisher : Bloomsbury Continuum; 1st edition (8 September 2016)
Language : English
Paperback : 304 pages
ISBN-10 : 9781472935953
ISBN-13 : 978-1472935953
Dimensions : 13.64 x 2.31 x 21.34 cmCustomer Reviews:
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Roger Scruton
Roger Vernon Scruton, FBA, FRSL (/ˈskruːtən/; born 27 February 1944) is an English philosopher who specialises in aesthetics. He has written over thirty books, including Art and Imagination (1974), The Meaning of Conservatism (1980), Sexual Desire (1986), The Philosopher on Dover Beach (1990), The Aesthetics of Music (1997), Beauty (2009), How to Think Seriously About the Planet: The Case for an Environmental Conservatism (2012), Our Church (2012), and How to be a Conservative (2014). Scruton has also written several novels and a number of general textbooks on philosophy and culture, and he has composed two operas.
Scruton was a lecturer and professor of aesthetics at Birkbeck College, London, from 1971 to 1992. Since 1992, he has held part-time positions at Boston University, the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., and the University of St Andrews. In 1982 he helped found The Salisbury Review, a conservative political journal, which he edited for 18 years, and he founded the Claridge Press in 1987. Scruton sits on the editorial board of the British Journal of Aesthetics, and is a Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Scruton has been called "the man who, more than any other, has defined what conservatism is" by British MEP Daniel Hannan and "England’s most accomplished conservative since Edmund Burke" by The Weekly Standard.
Outside his career as a philosopher and writer, Scruton was involved in the establishment of underground universities and academic networks in Soviet-controlled Central Europe during the Cold War, and he has received a number of awards for his work in this area.
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Pete Helme (http://www.rogerscruton.com) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.
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DWill82
5.0 out of 5 stars Worth a read to understand how dangerous modern academia isReviewed in Australia on 17 September 2022
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Having recently dragged myself through university, I can recommend this book as a brief glance into how poisoned academia has become, and how much of a threat it is to, not just the Western world, but the entire planet. Universities need to be urgently purged.
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Thomas Bilney
5.0 out of 5 stars One of the most important ripostes to modern thinkingReviewed in Australia on 23 October 2020
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This is a book which should be standard reading for any educated person. Without an understanding of the intellectual currents which came to dominate the twentieth century, it is impossible to unpick the current mess the world has got itself into. Scruton writes beautifully and with great clarity about the totalitarian spirit inherent within the deepest doctrines of leftist thinking. This book will illuminate you in many ways, but it may render you, in Coleridge's words, 'a sadder and a wiser man'.
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Nathan Hitzke
5.0 out of 5 stars Five StarsReviewed in Australia on 20 February 2016
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Brilliant! Amazing insight into the strange and unrealistic world that is The Left.
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atf
5.0 out of 5 stars Admirable!Reviewed in Germany on 16 October 2022
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Very enjoyable reading, if you are sympathetic to Scruton's concerns. If not, you'll hate it -- which goes to show how admirable a polemicist Scruton is.
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F.J. C.S.
5.0 out of 5 stars Se había descargado en la nubeReviewed in Spain on 26 August 2020
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Excelente
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mathboy
5.0 out of 5 stars Accurate valuable essential and entertaining in a black humor kind of way.Reviewed in the United States on 23 May 2018
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I went to a university filled to the brim with this kind of garbage long before knowledge of the problem became mainstream. This is a great overview with more than a little depth of the neo-Marxist Post Modern school of *thought* which has infected all of academia in the West. I wish I had read it before going to university.
Post modernists are some mix of literally delusional psychotics and political operatives of the extreme left (Marxist) wing posing at 'thinkers" while cashing big checks written to taxpayer accounts. Believe me, I've interacted with these people repeatedly and Post Modernism is a joke in terms of actual substantive intellectual content, but that hasn't stopped its hawkers from taking over universities.
The reason they were able to take over the universities is just because they set about to do exactly that where no one had wanted to do that before, not because these "Fools and Frauds" contributed anything of object value. Just the opposite. Their aim was to create an environment in which the quality of academic work would be unanalyzable and therefore beyond criticism.
Academics before them actually valued independent thought and protected minority opinion. These academics specifically seek to shut down opposing opinions and criticism of any kind and have, over successive generations, barred entrance to employment within the university to people with opposing viewpoints. Quite simply, there was a long, quiet but real and really vicious coup d'etat in the university by Marxists who routinely vote not to hire non-Marxists.
This is the current state of the humanities departments in virtually all universities. This is what your tax dollars are paying for. Read it and weep at the empty verbiage that people are puling down deep six figures to spew, and remember, these people are being paid with your tax dollars.
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JFR
5.0 out of 5 stars An inspiration and an example
Reviewed in Canada on 30 January 2017
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If you are concerned by the state of the humanities and social sciences today, you must read this essay. Sir Roger Scruton, one of the most clear-headed and sensible thinkers of our times, has updated his 1985 essay Thinkers of the New Left. In this fascinating news version, he covers most of the modern-day intellectual impostors who have dreamed of and engineered the weakening of our culture, mores, and institutions. Scruton exposes fairly the basic theses of these authors, but wastes no time pointing out to the contradictions, non sequiturs, and plain absurdities found in critical theory, post-rationalism, post-colonial studies, etc. At several places, he uses spirited humour to complement his thorough analysis, without resorting to ad hominem attacks, name-calling, or facile parodies.
Despite his disapproval -- and often his contempt -- for the authors he studies, he is gracious at times, acknowledging the elegant style of Hobsbawn, the wide culture of Perry Anderson, and conceding that Foucault could have become a major historian if he had lived longer. However, he does not find anything positive to say about some of the figures covered in his essay, and he is often quite harsh in his pronouncements. For instance, he debunks well the pretensions of Habermas, but does not concede that his softening on many questions and his emphasis on communication have been an improvement as compared to the harsh Marxism of the 1960s.
While the scope of the book is wide, it does not cover all the radical sects that have emerged since WWII. For instance, Scruton does not discuss dependency analysis and liberation theology, approaches that are still very important in the developing world and that have been revived with the election of Pope Francis. Also absent are some orthodox Marxists of importance like Ralph Miliband, and influential post-Marxist reformers such as Anthony Giddens. He does not cover any of the myriad environmentalists who have decided from the 1980s on to pursue the fight against capitalism through ecological arguments. The main absents of the book are the promoters of sexual identity politics, especially radical feminism, eco-feminism, and other incarnations of gender theory. I do not know why Scruton have not scrutinized those schools of thought. Maybe third world ideology, sociological essays, environmentalist alarmism and gender advocacy are not philosophical enough for him. It is too bad that he could not guide us there as well. However, Scruton has set the tone and offered a courageous example of rigorous intellectual resistance that should inspire his readers to confront the new left avatars in all fields and disciplines.
Jean-François Rioux
Ottawa, Canada
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Piero della Francesca
5.0 out of 5 stars Un libro intelligente e necessarioReviewed in Italy on 24 March 2017
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Molto ben scritto e con evidente onestà intellettuale (l'opinione personale dell'autore, un conservatore, non è mai celata), questo libro illustra e commenta le ideologie di sinistra dalla loro nascita fino ai giorni nostri. Un antidoto al pericoloso nonsenso del liberismo di questi tempi, che tutto vuole distruggere (cultura, tradizione, senso di apparteneza a una patria, libertà di parola e di culto, ogni sentimento positivo che unisca una comunità variegata sotto un ideale più grande) in nome dello statalismo e del globalismo.
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Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left
Roger Scruton
4.05
1,291 ratings167 reviews
From one of the leading critics of leftist orientations comes a study of the thinkers who have most influenced the attitudes of the New Left. Beginning with a ruthless analysis of New Leftism and concluding with a critique of the key strands in its thinking, Roger Scruton conducts a reappraisal of such major left-wing thinkers as E. P. Thompson, Ronald Dworkin, R. D. Laing, Jurgen Habermas, Gyorgy Lukacs, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, Slavoj Žižek, Ralph Milliband, and Eric Hobsbawm. In addition to assessments of these thinkers' philosophical and political contributions, the book contains a biographical and bibliographical section summarizing their careers and most important writings.
In Fools, Frauds and Firebrands Scruton asks, What does the Left look like today, and how has it evolved? He charts the transfer of grievances, from the working class to women, gays, and immigrants, asks what we can put in the place of radical egalitarianism, and what explains the continued dominance of antinomian attitudes in the intellectual world. Can there be any foundation for resistance to the leftist agenda without religious faith?
Writing with great clarity, Scruton delivers a devastating critique of modern left-wing thinking.
GenresPhilosophyPoliticsNonfictionHistoryCulturalEconomicsEssays
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304 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1998
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Sir Roger Scruton was a writer and philosopher who has published more than forty books in philosophy, aesthetics and politics. He was a fellow of the British Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He taught in both England and America and was a Visiting Professor at Department of Philosophy and Fellow of Blackfriars Hall, Oxford, he was also a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Washington D.C.
In 2015 he published two books, The Disappeared and later in the autumn, Fools Frauds and Firebrands. Fools Frauds and Firebrands is an update of Thinkers of the New Left published, to widespread outrage, in 1986. It includes new chapters covering Lacan, Deleuze and Badiou and some timely thoughts about the historians and social thinkers who led British intellectuals up the garden path during the last decades, including Eric Hobsbawm and Ralph Miliband.
In 2016 he again published two books, Confessions of A Heretic (a collection of essays) and The Ring of Truth, about Wagner’s Ring cycle, which was widely and favourably reviewed. In 2017 he published On Human Nature (Princeton University Press), which was again widely reviewed, and contains a distillation of his philosophy. He also published a response to Brexit, Where We Are (Bloomsbury).
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Thinkers of the New Left
by
Roger Scruton
T's review (2/5)
Sep 10, 2018
it was okbookshelves: borrowed
*29/11/22 Update
T
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November 17, 2023
*29/11/22 Update
Okay, so I'm glad to see that my poorly edited takedown of the late Roger Scruton's book has climbed to the top of the GoodReads' reviews for this book. Looking back at this review, I’ve realised that it’s much more of a summary, and notes reflecting my opinion at the time, rather than a review. I still stand by much of what I’ve written here, and having read more of Scruton and his enemies, I still feel that a better conversation could have been opened up by this book.
I can still remember ambling over my desk in my poorly insulated flat, scratching my head at the attacks and oversimplifications of thinkers I admired. Reading this also gave me an insight into a frankly underreported psychological phenomenon - the persecuted conservative. Roger claimed that he was attacked for the publication of his book, for daring to attack the academic Left - that great great powerful beast. He lost his reputation and also a lot of friends, "the book went down like a lead balloon, and [he] with it" he said in his interview with Polly Toynbee.
You see the late great Roger taught at the most prestigious colleges (Birkbeck and Oxford), received a Medal of Merit of the Czech Republic, a Knight Bachelor from the United Kingdom, the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland, the Commander's Cross with Star of the Hungarian Order of Merit, received money from Big Tobacco, spoke at Stanford's Hoover Institute, and had the ear of senior politicians, and wrote in some of the most prestigious journals and magazines. To quote Stewart Lee, "if that's being cancelled, I'll take a slice of that cancellation please!".
Now I don't like attacking people on account of their personal lives, jobs, or education, but Scruton's attacks in this volume are equally or even more below the belt. Scruton did very very well for himself, but his attempts to talk down his success and influence are not symptomatic of British modesty, they merely serve the interests of the culture war. A culture war which threatened his own field which he cherished and loved - the humanities. Reading this, one is reminded of how Ludwig Von Mises, in his Memoirs complained about his lack of recognition, despite being offered a job in the most prestigious bank in his country, coming from nobility, and similarly having the ear of the senior political leaders on the left and right.
I assume that what Scruton and other intellectual conservatives want is the recognition of their classmates. Scruton wanted ideological hegemony in one of the few areas where his team's success was not triumphant. No Marxist, postmodernist, postcolonialist intellectual has held high office in Britain, America, or in fact most of the world - but plenty of conservatives have. This fact doesn't move Scruton, but when he sees windbag professors doling out gluten-free texts on deconstruction and dialectical materialism (which most students certainly won't care for or read) he is furious. "Why should these pointyheads be reading Fanon, Foucault, and Freiere - why not Lord Acton, Hayek, and me?" Scruton balks.
And this is a shame, because whilst Scruton does occasionally make some honest critiques of his intellectual foes, it is swiftly drowned out by cheap political point scoring. For example, Scruton is correct when he says that Foucault's worldview is simplistic. However, saying that Foucault's concept of power is a rehashing of historical materialism is just plain wrong. Similarly, Scruton is onto something when he claims that Louis Althusser doesn't really engage with much of the literature which would be critical to his worldview, but better critiques of Althusser had already been made by people on the Left at that time (see The Poverty of Theory). So, to reel in on a reading list of books and articles read only by a small group of graduate students, to support the notion that the academic Left, which has almost no political, economic, and increasingly less social clout, controls the political narrative is just wrong.
Original review 10/09/18
This is the original 1985 version of 'Thinkers of the New Left' which caused poor old Mr Scruton the huge embarrassment he endured promptly after the book's publication. Roger Scruton still today bemoans the Leftist hegemony in culture, media, and universities (of course, conveniently leaving out the sphere of politics and economics). This is despite his status as one of the most important philosophers in the Anglosphere.
In this book, Scruton works through thinkers he decides are 'on the left', whether they be self-described Marxists, social democrats, left leaning liberals, anarchists, or simply thinkers popular with the academic Left (e.g. Foucault, whose later politics were aligned with free market neoliberalism). The 1980s version of the book differs slightly to the newer revision of the book 'Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left'. This volume is slimmer, and doesn't include Zizek and Badiou, but it does contain R.D. Laing and Gailbraith, who were taken out of the newer edition, as Scruton sees their influence as largely diminished.
Scruton begins his book giving the historical idea of 'the Left', arising out of French politics, some 300 years ago. Here, even before the book starts dissecting any of the thinkers, Scruton dares to trump out the long debunked lie that Chomsky denied the Cambodian genocide - a lie which was debunked years prior to the book's publication. Then he explains the absence of 'Godfather of the New Left' Herbert Marcuse, because he sees Eliseo Vivas' book 'Contra Marcuse (1971)' as a good enough rebuttal. This is surprising since Marcuse had a larger impact on the New Left than most of the thinkers Scruton touched on. Also, Marcuse's work has a pronounced focus on aesthetics, which is one of Scruton's main subjects of inquiry. Since Vivas' book is out of print and a pretty rare find, I'll have to take Scruton's word for it.
E.P. Thompson - Scruton attacks Thompson for being a Soviet apologetic, and sides with Leszek Kolakowski in his response to Thompson (reprinted in 'Is God Happy'). Thompson felt betrayed by Kolakowski's turn to anti Communism and religious apologetics. Thompson's reasoned that the Soviet countries were in their relative infancy, and when compared to other states at the time, it wasn't surprising that so much blood was shed in the creation of a New Society. Whilst Scruton does congratulate Thompson's magnum opus The Making of the English Working Class, he sees Thompson as too uncritical of Marxism, despite referencing his book 'The Poverty of Theory', which is quite literally a critique of many aspects of Marxism.
Ronald Dworkin - Scruton's critique of Dworkin is that his replacing of Conservative legality, as only leading to a sort of Leninist view of rights, which removes rights that don't allow for socialism. Of course, Dworkin is a left liberal who is critiquing liberalism's obsession with individual rights, over collective rights, so Scruton makes the logical leap that this will lead to totalitarianism.
Michel Foucault - Although Scruton has talked of his 'soft spot' for Foucault's later work on sexuality, he sees his philosophy as having an irreversible negative impact of academia and culture, especially Women's Studies and Cultural Studies. Scruton claims that Foucault's analysis is simplistic, narrowing everything down to power, and siding with the opressed (a criticism that holds some weight, especially in his earlier work). His analysis is a slightly more mature critique than Jordan Peterson's incoherent ramblings, but still suffers the same faults. I'm still quite unsure as to how Scruton gets to the conclusion that Foucault is a pseudo-Marxist and anarchist, considering that he died a classical liberal, spent his life criticising Marxism, and even went so far as to remove any ‘Marxist’ elements from his first book after its second publication. Here political pointscoring seemed more important to Scruton than content and rigour.
R.D. Laing - Laing is critiqued for blaming all of an individual's problems on society. Scruton sees Laing’s antipsychiatry philosophy as similar to Foucault and the early work of Thomas Szasz. Scruton spoils his critique by homogenising any philosophy critical of society as us versus them.
Raymond Williams - Scruton, in this chapter comes across similarly to Harold Bloom, criticising Williams as a resentful critic, forcing his ideology onto books, rather than analysing them from an aesthetic view. He also bemoans the fact that Williams presents his Marxist criticism as 'obvious'. But, don't all critics? Isn't that the point of critcisim, to present the work and it's understanding through a supposedly objective lens? Of course, Scruton doesn't see his idols F.R. Leavis or William Hazlitt as doing this.
Rudolf Bahro - The critique of Bahro here is pretty simple. Bahro saw the 'failure' of communism, and still maintained that he wanted 'Socialism with a human face'. Like Ernst Bloch, Bahro rejected Stalinism and hoped for a humanistic alternative. But for Scruton, this wasn’t based on principles, but ignorance.
Antonio Gramsci - I was shocked to see Gramsci. Whilst he wasn't even alive during the 'New Left' era. However, Scruton is right that Gramsci is essentially a product of the New Left. If it weren't for the utilisation of Gramsci's work by folks like Stuart Hall and Louis Althusser, he would probably would have been forgotten about. However, considering that fascism is defined as "anti-communism" I find it disturbing that Scruton attempts to link Gramsci's idea of 'praxis' with fascism, and claim that Gramsci's death helped the New Left invent the idea that fascism wasn't related to socialism. This is totally ahistorical.
Louis Althusser - A lot of Scruton's analysis here isn't substantive, and Scruton even makes a joke that Althusser "killed his wife for revisionism" - which is a bit classless mocking the mentally ill. The rest of the critique is on Althusser's work being boring, and refusing to work outside the Marxist paradigm. Scruton is correct, but again, a much more insightful conversation could have been had. Althusser was a poor philosopher, but his writings on Lacan, aesthetics, and Hegel could have been attacked in a much more interesting way.
Immanuel Wallerstein - Wallerstein was a surprising add to the list. Scruton doesn't provide an in-depth analysis of Wallerstein's world systems, but yammers on about his disagreements with the third worldist idea of adding an international aspect to the classical class analysis.
Jurgen Habermas - Scruton blames the rise of Frankfurt School theorists in Germany as being due to the German establishment repentance for Nazism. Scruton sees Habermas' effort to combine a linguistic theory with Critical Theory as simplistic, but clouded in academic jargon. Ironically, Scruton provides an assessment for this kind of 'academic Marxism' which has been made by plenty of activists before, namely that this kind of abstract theorising is so beyond the application of the working class that it ends up having very little value. Scruton is correct when he notes that "revolutionary elements... are slowly neutralised by boredom".
Perry Anderson - Prominent thinker and historian, educated at Eton and Oxford, Anderson encapsulates everything Scruton hates - the privileged leftist. Anderson is painted in this chapter as the left wing version of Oswald Spengler, a historian who forces his a priori worldview onto history, wedging all events into a poorly thought out metanarrative. Ideological biases in history are obviously an awkward subject, and I cannot comment on the veracity of any of Anderson's claims, because Scruton seldom brings any up. However, at least we can say that Anderson's biases are clear and he is open about them. Then, Scruton twists Anderson's comments about 'white emigres' like Ludwig Wittgenstein, Isaiah Berlin, and Melanie Klein, into a pseudo-antiSemitic rant, which is simply defamatory. Events later in Scruton’s life would make this accusation quite ironic.
Gyorgy Lukacs - Despite being one of the most underrated and overlooked Marxist theorists, Lukacs' work can certainly be criticised for it dogmatism and vulgarity (especially when it comes to his literary criticism). However, Scruton instead chooses to cherry pick Lukacs' quotes from works that the author later abandoned to show Lukacs' theological view of Marxism. Scruton again has some occasionally interesting points but he falls back on attacking Lukacs as a self-hating bourgeois, rather than asking questions about the applicability of Lukacs’ ideas, or their philosophical merit.
J.K. Galbraith - One of the few prominent left of centre economists to gain political power, Galbraith was a liberal institutionalist, but Scruton characterises him as a 'red under the bed'. This chapter sees Scruton doing his best to show Galbraith's work as based on simplistic day to day experiences, such as the idea that hierarchy in the workplace is based on power and not profit. Scruton is right that some of Galbraith’s ideas on power, the corporation, and price fixing are based on Galbraith’s pre-determined policy toolkit, but a much more fruitful analysis could have been made. Why not take a deeper look at the empirical effectiveness of Galbraith’s proposals?
Jean Paul Sartre - Like Foucault, Scruton has a soft spot for Sartre. However, his late political treatise 'Critique of Dialectical Reason' is trashed as a work which bears no relation to reality and simply acts as a dogmatic reassertion of Sartre' preformed political views. The book doesn't actually do what it promises on the tin, instead it avoids the contradiction between dialectical reasoning and formal logic. Furthermore, Scruton bashes Sartre for revealing his 'anti-bourgeois' attitude in his fictional work, which is something Scruton falls back on when he needs space to fill on the page.
What is Right - This final chapter goes on a rant about how the 'leftist' mentality and worldview is simply the amalgamation of hate and resentfulness, which offers a secular soteriology of utopia on earth. Boring, unoriginal, and unconvincing, Scruton cherry picks quotes to fit his view, and offers Conservative ideology of yesteryear in response.
Perhaps then, readers should remain in their tradition of not reading authors they disagree with politically, since attacking strawmen and homogenising opponents as enemies of civilisation is not a positive enterprise. Unfortunately it's Scruton doing it this time...
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Sam Eccleston
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January 10, 2016
For those, like me, who were forced to wade through the product of the 'nonsense machine' overseen by Lacan, Deleuze et al at University, this book is a long-overdue expose of perhaps the grandest example of intellectual charlatanry in modern times. Scruton ruthlessly exposes the absurd ideas and vacuous, incoherent prose commonly produced by prominent left wing intellectuals, and draws attention, where necessary, to the role many have played in defending the bloody tyrannies which characterised the Communist block until the last decade of the 20th century.
There may be those who find the frequency with which Scruton admits to not understanding what the authors he castigates mean in their texts unsettling, however, the lengthy extracts which punctuate this book should serve to illustrate why this is; the works in question are composed, chiefly, of lengthy strings of fragment sentences, few of which are clearly articulated to those that surround them, full of un-referenced pronouns, undefined technical terms, and descriptors and qualifiers in series with no obvious referent. When meaning is finally found, it is typically either trivial, patently absurd, beside the point, or morally repugnant. Scruton points this out over and over again.
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Owlseyes
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February 29, 2024
"Only someone raised in the anglosphere could believe, as I believed in the aftermath of 1968, that the political alternative to revolutionary socialism is conservatism"
in "How to be a conservative" by Roger Scruton
"The great intellectual advantage of socialism is obvious. Through its ability to align itself with ideals that every man can recognize, socialism has been able to perpetuate the belief in its moral purity, despite crime upon crime committed in its name. That a socialist revolution may cost millions of lives, that it may involve the wilful murder of an entire class, the destruction of a culture, the elimination of learning and the desecration of art, will leave not the slightest stigma on the doctrines with which it glorifies its action"
in: "The Meaning of Conservatism" by Roger Scruton
"Like many middle class people I came to Socialism through Marxism (to be more specific through Deutscher's biography of Trotsky). The trouble with Marxism is that it is fine if you make it your political servant but terrible if it becomes your political master."
Letter of Tony Blair (former Prime Minister of the UK) to Michael Foot in 1982
This is a collection of essays originally published in The Salisbury Review, three years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Though being overtly a sort of attack on the Marxist theoreticians, it includes anarchists, socialists, libertarians and other "types" [my expression] worried, as well, about "social justice".
(Edward Palmer Thompson)
(Ronald Dworkin)
(Raymond Henry Williams)
(Rudolf Bahro)
(György Lukács)
(Francis Rory Peregrine "Perry" Anderson)
(Ronald David Laing)
(Jürgen Habermas)
(John Kenneth Galbraith)
(Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre)
(Antonio Francesco Gramsci)
(Michel Foucault)
(Louis Pierre Althusser)
(Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein)
No, he didn't include Bernie Sanders.
Nor Marcuse...or Chomsky.
P.S. Nor this 'type' of "soft socialism" [Scruton's expression]
After a critical discussion of several international and prominent figures of the New Left, Scruton dedicates the last chapter of the book to defining basic differences between the New Left and the New Right. Of the former, I retain his view of this not-total respect for the institutions and a paradox at the heart of the New Left: a "desire for the total community" which goes hand in hand with "the fear for the 'others' who are the true source of social power".
As for the New Right, it believes "more in responsible government than in impersonal government, in the autonomy and personality of the institutions, in the Common Law".
Power is evil only when abused.
The book includes a sort of appendix with biographical and bibliographical data on the figures approached
Fools, Frauds and Firebrands by Roger Scruton review – a demolition of socialist intellectuals
in: https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
UPDATE
https://www.lawliberty.org/2019/06/03...
UPDATE
My condolences, in respect for his meaningful life.
http://dailynous.com/2020/01/12/roger...
https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2020/01...
https://amp.theguardian.com/books/202...
https://amp.theguardian.com/books/202...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/16/bo...
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2020/01/a...
https://newcriterion.com/issues/2020/...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/29/op...
UPDATE
Deconstructing the Left
https://europeanconservative.com/revi...
UPDATE
https://europeanconservative.com/arti...
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Rafael Munia
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December 8, 2016
If you want to read a manual on how to write an entire book arguing against straw man, this may interest you. If you are looking for a justification to not understanding or not wanting to read any of the authors mentioned in the book, this might interest you. If you are looking for a meaningful and honest critique of contemporary philosophical thought, then don't wast your time with this. This book is living proof of how much you can get away with when the audience does not understand the topic you are talking about.
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A
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June 14, 2022
9/10.
The year is 1936. The German working class, backing a certain Fuhrer, has seen an economic boom. With unemployment dropping from 33% to almost nil in three years, their leader has answered their prayers. A decade earlier in Italy, the working class rallies under the fasces to bring to power another Right-wing leader. The Marxists are in panic. "What about the iron laws of history? What about 'scientific' socialism? Why are the workers of the world not uniting?". Chaos reigns. Ideas brew. Yet out of that chaos spawned the monsters of our time.
Out came Gramsci from his prison cell. The working class that supported Mussolini and Hitler was actually not the "proletariat", but instead was the "petty bourgeoisie". They were fake workers. Just like how Stalin's meddlesome Ukrainian peasants were "revisionists", "reactionaries", "pseudo-Fascists", and "wreckers" instead of working men and women. Don't be silly.
These "petty bourgeoisie" have been infected by the "hegemony" of capitalist society. Capitalism (incarnated as the "bourgeoisie") has taken power over all the institutions — education, academia, government, media, and entertainment. Throwing away the "'scientific' socialist laws of history", Gramsci revised the Marxist historical thesis. Capitalism does not automatically produce the communist Utopia. Instead, the communists need to infiltrate the institutions, burrow their angelic heads in the husk of capitalism, and thus usurp the hegemony of the bourgeoisie. When that is completed, the revolution can come.
Such has been the history of the past 60 years. France, Germany, the United States, the UK — pretty much the whole West has been eaten alive by a deadly tapeworm, growing in its insides. Though, in actuality, there are two tapeworms, joyously collaborating in their parasitic feast. One spawned in France and another in Germany.
In France the tapeworm was commanded by the infantile narcissist Sartre and the anal-loving Foucault. Sartre, a key figure of "existentialism", had a wonderful thought: "existence precedes essence". Thus, there is no essence of man. There is no goal for man, nor any generally desirable state for all to strive for. All norms are slavery, and thus I must throw them all away, and find my "essence" in my own self-creation. The stupidity of this thought is apparent to anyone who has read the Greeks, the Romans, the Bible, or lived until they were 21. If you try to "live how you like", you begin to despise yourself. You feel like a disgusting waste. This is because there is a normative state for man to strive towards. When one falls away from it, one begins to become depressed, distraught, anxious, fat, and weak. They come together.
The solution is to discipline one's self. One must delay immediate gratification (prioritize your future self over your present self) and moderate one's pleasures. Bodily, you must push through the struggle of lifting to become strong. Mentally, you must train your concentration by reading. Instead of dissipating your energy in the pleasures of the moment, you must look to the future, set goals to become more virtuous, and pursue them to the best of your ability. You command your will, but you take directions from God. Giving you a moral structure (extremely close to that reached by the Romans and Greeks by thought), He tells you how to become virtuous. And in that state of virtue, the highest state of man, you will rejoice in the exercise of the virtues. You will rejoice in your strength when you can lift 250 lbs. You will rejoice in your willpower when you can fast for two days. You will rejoice in your service when you can accept orders from your boss with enthusiasm and promptness.
Against this refreshingness of health stands the anal-worshipper Foucault. Seeing "power" everywhere, eternally lurking and all-powerful, it controls his ever-important Self. "Power" creates norms for Foucault — norms he does not like. It puts prisoners in prison. It condemns homosexuals. It puts the mad in asylums. Thus, "power" (always abstract), categorizes man and condemns some to torment. The solution for Foucault is to show how normative structures are relative. If they are relative, then no one needs to follow them. Unfortunately for Foucault, this is false. Man has a certain nature. Given that nature, certain institutions are needed to constrain it. Man is not perfect (= original sin, the most obvious fact of existence), which creates a need for a lawful sovereign of society that keeps society functioning. Thus, we get prisons, asylums, and laws against homosexuality (which decreases birth rates). Unfortunately, Foucault did not understand this. In his sexual license, his great desire to be anally penetrated, he contracted AIDS and died. Lust and pride had destroyed him, though he would deny their existence.
Now to Germany. From here came the Frankfurt School, the German-Jewish sect from which came Adorno, Horkheimer, Wilhelm Reich, and Marcuse. Kicked out of Germany by Hitler, they took refuge in the US and UK. Here, in top university positions, they fomented the youth to revolt against "capitalism". Telling the youth that they were repressed by their families ("authoritarianism" — basically Nazism), repressed by monogamy and marriage (definitely Fascistic), and repressed by Christian faith ("The Father" = Authority = Hitler), the Frankfurt School told the youth that they should break free and find their "true selves". Once authority is trashed, capitalism must be too. Capitalism "reifies" one's desires, giving one the illusion that humans are things, and that things have agency. People worship goods and services, thus enslaving them to these material objects.
The solution is to break free from things. Instead of things, we need free love, gays, LSD, civil rights, and blue hair. And through these solutions, we saw an ever-more peaceful and loving society. Not. We now know of women's declining happiness and increasing anxiety since the 60s, the insatiability of BLM, the extreme mental illness of LGBTIDGAF, how drugs have destroyed our lower class, and how "free love" leads to ever-more sexually dissatisfied males (porn) and females.
Righteous authority creates order. When righteous authority is obeyed, peace reigns. Societies function smoothly. When the authority of God and the authority of the father are overthrown, you get all the negative consequences listed above.
The other critique of the Frankfurt School, that of the "slavery to things" that capitalism creates, has already been told of over 3000 years ago. In two words: "original sin". Man is enticed by external goods when it is irrational to desire them. They will never make him happy. The solution must be spiritual, as laid out in the Bible and by the Stoics, not political. The Frankfurt School wants a "new political order", but that, once again, means a pious dream of the Utopia of Equality. It's not going to happen. It will never happen. Natural human differences create natural hierarchy. Only through hierarchy, through the better and more-experienced commanding the lesser, will societies function. Just as ships need captains, armies need commanders, clubs need presidents, and companies need CEOs, so too do all of our institutions need leaders. Infantile revolt and pouting will do nothing but make you unhappy and your society dysfunctional. When you get a whole society doing such pouting, what do you get? The modern West.
———————————
As the Gramscian infiltration progressed through the 60s, 70s, and 80s, new academics with New-speak were welcomed into the university. Speaking magical gibberish, casting sophistical spells with their words, these academics led their students to gape in awe at their erudition. Twisting their minds in strange ways, learning the intricacies of New-speak, repeating slogan after slogan, the students became professors, and eventually continued the word revolution. None of the words really mattered. All that mattered was whether, out of the great nonsense factory, a Leftist thought was produced. The product — essential. The path — as complex as possible.
Thus students read their pseudo-mathematical Lacan, their abstraction-lord Deleuze, their Marxist set-theoretician Badiou, and their Slovenian spastic Zizek. Lacan, mouthing about the "big Other", castration, "The Real", and adding in mathematical formulas for extra spice, successfully convinced his students that he was a profound sage. Deleuze, telling the world of his revelation of the "Body without Organs" and that cause/effect is a deluded "binary" notion, was to show us the new path. No worries about rationality! Deleuze, in his Logic of Sense, tells us that "he is explicitly challenging the distinction between sense and nonsense, showing that the true use of language is expressive, not representational, so that nonsense is as much a part of communication as what is normally called sense". Right!
So students line up for their undergraduate and graduate degrees, and get fed this nonsense. Told to kowtow to their betters, they submit to of the great Ideas of the New Left. Never reading Plato, never reading the Stoics, having no idea what clear writing is, they crucify their minds on the cross of Nonsense. Their ideas, spawning out of a great, convoluted factory, always go to the Left. They always critique Western norms — the family, Christianity, heterosexuality, White people, and virtue.
These thinkers have no purpose but to produce ideology, the very thing they supposedly oppose. Critiquing the notion of objective truth, they proceed to recast truth in their own egalitarian image. Facts don't matter, and anyone who mentions them is automatically a heretic, to be immolated immediately. The intellectuals are destroying thought for egalitarianism. Poisoning the waters of thought, muddying them with a great mess of jargon, serves to force future academics to wade through these tortuous waters. The goal? At the end of the sluggish journey, create a resentful egalitarian. That's it.
Run away from these academics, these paragons of pseudo-thought. Don't be tricked by the hope that their reason-straining, nigh reason-destroying thought, will make you smarter. The end result of their thought is sickness — personal and societal.
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Steve
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October 22, 2015
The boot goes in.
Hobsbawn, Galbraith, Sartre, Foucault, Habermas, the Post-Modern left, Gramsci and Said, oh and Zizek. There's the body count. Scruton gives us thorough overviews of each of his victim's, calmly dissecting as he goes along.
Scruton is one of the few sane conservative minds of the day and all of his books are worth a look.
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David
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August 11, 2019
Why did I read this infuriating drivel? Know thy enemy, I guess. I’m all with Mister Scruton when it comes to his critique of the convoluted language employed by many writers of the left. But that critique can be thrown all the way back to the thinkers of antiquity, none of whom anyone would consider to be particularly left-leaning. I also concede the point that at times the ramblings of writers such as Deleuze or Lacan may indeed not get to any particular point and rather constitute intellectual self-infatuation. Watch a lecture by Lacan and it becomes blatantly obvious that the man was a bit of a self-adorning cock. Nevertheless, this book is nothing but an uninformed crusade of a conservative against left ideas. He calls for proof of these ideas? Well, somebody give me proof of the superiority of conservative ideas - I’m all ears. Philosophy by its nature does not particularly lend itself to ultimate proofs - it is after all fundamentally theoretical. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t have a contest of ideas. Also, dismissing left thinkers because they don’t start every book with a preface condemning Stalinism is silly. Granted, during certain eras there was a problem on the left of not disentangling left ideas from the cruelties of Soviet and other socialist regimes, but that doesn’t negate the validity of left thinking. And the eternal crying over the dominance of left thinking? Please, give me a break! Scruton is from the UK, a country that since the days of Thatcher has not looked at a left thinker with its ass. And I am yet to encounter many people in the circles I frequent who have read, much less advocate for any of the thinkers he criticizes.
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Stephen
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March 20, 2017
An excellent overview of leftist thinkers that, if you approach it with an open mind, will help you see their flaws rather than to dismiss them outright. Scruton is fair, if at times narrow in his approach. For me, he need not convince me of Badiou and Zizek; for the first, I’m already convinced he’s a fraud (compare his thoughts on Thermidor with a real historian like François Furet’s, and you’ll see the difference between a bumbler and a historian); for the second, I have no warmth or affection for his babbling, free-associative thinking just because he’s watched the same movies as we have, listened to the same pop music. Ronald Dworkin is the epitome of the dull, predictable house-style at New York Review of Books (I want my time back for having ever attempted him or John Rawls). Edward Said’s “orientalism” may have produced more misguided thinking among the left than ignorance of Islam itself. So for figures like these I didn’t need much persuading.
For the others, Scruton is almost too generous. I would have liked to see him attempt a kill-shot on Hobsbawm, in some other mode than “he never renounced his communism, therefore one must ignore him,” just to test my own thinking on him. But he praises the historian, while reserving his critique for Hobsbawm’s polemics alone. This has never concerned me, because there’s so much to gain from Hobsbawm otherwise. So as soon as I finished this book, I went back to reading the historian with the usual enthusiasm. Same for Foucault. Scruton admits his excellent style, his commitment as a real historian. Here he goes a little further in his critique, which I warmed up to, because his main issue is my main issue with Foucault: if inequality or power imbalance is constantly being referred to as “systemic”, then there’s really no point in fighting it, because power will always remain abstract, out of reach. Foucault falls back on this approach like a need, like most who need identity politics do. This is a hugely influential, categorical mistake.
Where I lost faith with Scruton is on Deleuze. Out of them all, he scores the best points on him. When most people think “Deleuze”, they think of his anti-capitalism writings with Guattari. These happen to be his most impenetrable, and even something of a joke played on us, which I blame Guattari the psychoanalyst for. It is true that it often feels like Deleuze is making it up as he goes along. Scruton sees this as a sign of fraudulence. I see it as his methodology of scaffolding, building and building upon historical ideas to discover what is true of the present. You often get the feeling of not knowing where he’s heading, but that’s where the excitement is, to discover the contiguous with the present through a fascinating mind. But I’ll allow this could be simply a matter of taste. Deleuze is outstanding on literary figures like Proust and Kafka, which Scruton doesn’t even acknowledge as part of the oeuvre. He doesn’t even seem aware of Deleuze the theologian, which is where a conservative can best read him for profit. Deleuze’s lapses aren’t Deleuze’s limitations, as they are for most every other writer. Scruton should have read him more carefully, and avoided the secondary literature altogether which he self-defeatingly relies on. Or simply leave Deleuze out of the book in the first place. “He baffles me” is not a counter-argument.
Likewise, with Perry Anderson and his New Left Review. He doesn’t seem to have recognized that they underwent a rethinking in 2000, having looked at the post-Cold War world and accepted a certain kind of defeat.
Forgivable though. The last thing in the world those of the left should be doing is whimpering into one’s blankies with Trump having kicked everyone’s ass and took names left and right. Now is the time to engage with conservative thinkers like Peter Hitchens, David Frum, Robert Kagan, and Roger Scruton et al for what they see and what we obviously don’t.
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Old Dog Diogenes
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September 18, 2022
Over decades of philosophical meandering the 'new left' have locked themselves in a box that is impenetrable from the outside world, and they look to control what is true and not true from the inside. They use subjectivity as a shield to guard themselves from all intellectual discord. Utilizing tactics such as new-speak and circular logic they look to paint an alternate view of reality, one where institutions, traditions, and authorities are all evil and society is to be seen always as victim and oppressor, and when confronted with their logical fallacies they fall back on subjectivism and general consensus within their box. This can be plainly seen played out in the Universities of the United States over the past 30 years. Where by way of the culture wars the left has gained substantial ground in the USA. Going as far as to attempt to create an utterly new conception of American history. Scruton’s description of Newspeak “casting spells” can be seen clearly in the American youth. Where there is no value placed on objective truth and all value placed on the left's idea of "social justice".
to quote Scruton:
There is no point to the old ideas of objectivity and universal truth; all that matters is the fact that we agree.
But who are we? And what do we agree about? Turn to Rorty’s essays, and you will soon find out. ‘We’ are all feminists, liberals, advocates of today’s radical causes and the open curriculum; ‘we’ do not believe in God, or in any inherited religion; nor do the old ideas of authority, order and self-discipline carry weight for us. ‘We’ make up our minds as to the meaning of texts, by creating through our words the consensus that includes us. There is no constraint on us, beyond the community to which we have chosen to belong. And because there is no objective truth but only our own self-engendered consensus, our position is unassailable from any point of view outside it. Pragmatists not only decide what to think; they protect themselves from whoever doesn’t think the same.
and Later:
In place of objectivity we have only ‘inter-subjectivity’—in other words, consensus. Truths, meanings, facts and values are now regarded as negotiable. The curious thing, however, is that this woolly-minded subjectivism goes with a vigorous censorship. Those who put consensus in the place of truth quickly find themselves distinguishing the true from the false consensus. And inevitably the consensus is ‘on the left’. . . .
Thus the ‘we’ of Rorty rigorously excludes all conservatives, traditionalists and reactionaries. Only liberals can belong to it; just as only feminists, radicals, gay activists and anti-authoritarians can take advantage of deconstruction. . . . The inescapable conclusion is that subjectivity, relativity and irrationalism are advocated not in order to let in all opinions, but precisely so as to exclude the opinions of people who believe in old authorities and objective truths. This is the short cut to Gramsci’s new cultural hegemony: not to vindicate the new culture against the old, but to show that there are no grounds for either, so that nothing remains save political commitment...
The final result of the culture wars has been an enforced political correctness, by which the blasted landscape of art, history and literature is policed for the residual signs of racist, sexist, imperialist or colonialist ways of thinking.”
Anyone who is paying any attention—to the university, to the media, to popular literature (especially the cesspit of YA), to the arts, and to public commemoration—will recognize the truth in this description. But of course this “enforced political correctness” no longer plays out solely in academic institutions. One wonders what the next stage of this will look like. We are already seeing some of it.
and in Scruton's own gloomy words,
“We have entered a period of cultural suicide.”
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Christopher Blosser
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May 3, 2016
The original publication of Scruton's Thinkers of the New Left in 1985 reportedly "brought his career as an academic philosopher to an end", say Roger Scruton in an interview with Ricochet. This is not to say he was censored outright ("the people on the left don't 'censor' -- they look with compassion on your stupidity, take you quietly to the side, and recommend quietly that you retire for a while"). Rather, so great was the negative outcry from the left that his publisher eventually surrendered all copies, removed them from bookshops and relocated them to Scruton's garden.
Call him a sucker for punishment, but Scruton recently updated his infamous book for republication in late 2015, "Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left" (the snarky title somewhat betraying what is actually a substantial intellectual survey) -- in Scruton's own words, "I add a consideration of Hobsbawm and Adorno, touch on Rorty and Said, and explore the Parisian nonsense machine, with Deleuze, Guattari, Lacan and Badiou. I end with Žižek". Of course, Scruton himself appears well-primed to bear the brunt of another round of hyperbolic abuse by all parties offended.
Personally, I enjoyed this immensely, both for Scruton's dry, British wit as well as for the sheer breadth of intellectuals covered in his survey, a smattering of whom I've acquainted myself with in college but have little desire to pursue further. Suffice to say both as a husband, father and breadwinner, I've significantly less time to read as I did in college and am rather more judicious of what books to occupy my time. If anything, Scruton should be duly credited for his incredible display of patience and constitution in wading through book after book and thousands of pages of left-wing theorizing, or what he dubs the deliberately-calculated "the nonsense machine" -- providing a welcome reminder of what I really haven't missed, and don't regret missing, in my failure to further engage this particular genre of "scholarship").
Beyond the critical survey and skewering of the icons and idols of the left, what I particularly appreciated is the closing chapter, "What is Right?", where Scruton briefly lays out his own principles and political philosophy in response.
For Scruton, it is precisely in the leftist intellectual's inclination to elevate theory above reality, to immerse himself so completely in a class-war against the phantasm of the "bourgeoise" -- that they inevitably blind themselves to the concrete, tangible reality of the common man in front of them, and in such a way that, historically, countless acts of violence and murder have been sanctioned in pursuit of a theoretical, abstract ideal. (Time and again, Scruton returns to this point of how such intellectuals have quite willingly and consciously white-washed and carried water for the most brutal and bloody of regimes, all in the name of the "revolution").
Moreover, it is the dearth of recognition left-wing theory gives to the "little platoons" that Scruton abhors -- "all that makes society possible -- law, property, custom, hierarchy, family, negotiation, government, institutions". It is these mediating institutions of civil society, however imperfect and flawed, that exist and stand between the individual and the "totalizing vision" of the coercive state, and it is through the free assembly that we come together in such civil institutions that "politics is softened, and people are protected from the worst kinds of dictatorship."
To quote Scruton at length:
"… colleges and schools, of clubs, regiments, orchestras, choirs and sporting leagues – all of which offer, along with the benefit of membership, a distinctive ethos of their own. By joining these things you not only put yourself under the conventions, traditions and obligations of the group; you acquire a sense of your own worth as a member, and a bond of association that gives meaning to your acts. Such institutions stand between the citizen and the state, offering discipline and order without the punitive sanctions through which the state exerts its sovereignty. They are what civilization consists in, and their absence from the socialist states of modern times is entirely explicable, since free association makes it impossible to achieve the ‘equality of being’ towards which socialists aspire. To put the matter simply: association means discrimination, and discrimination means hierarchy.
My alternative political philosophy, therefore, would advocate not only a distinction between civil society and the state, but also traditions of institution building outside the control of the state. Social life should be founded in free association and protected by autonomous bodies, under whose auspices people can flourish according to their social nature, acquiring the manners and aspirations that endow their lives with meaning. That ‘right-wing’ vision of politics will not be devoted to the structures of government only, or to the social stratifications and class divisions that are obsessively referred to on the left. It will be largely devoted to the building and governance of institutions, and to the thousand ways in which people enrich their lives through corporations, traditions and spheres of accountability."
* * *
P.S. For a more serious and somewhat less polemical work of Scrutons, see his A Short History of Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Wittgenstein 2001.
See alsoThinking for England, by Nicholas Wrote. The Guardian 10/28/00:
For Roger Scruton, as for so many of his generation, the Paris riots of May 1968 were the defining political moment of his life. He was in the Latin Quarter when students tore up the cobblestones to hurl at the riot police. His friends overturned cars and uprooted lamp-posts to erect the barricades. Representatives of his own discipline, old philosophers like Marx and new ones like Foucault, were providing the intellectual fuel for the fire raging on the ground.
As he watched the events unfold from his apartment window, and listened to his friends, drunk on revolutionary hope and excitement, Scruton found his own emotions and opinions crystallising. "I suddenly realised that I was on the other side," he says. "What I saw was an unruly mob of self-indulgent middle-class hooligans. When I asked my friends what they wanted, what were they trying to achieve, all I got back was this ludicrous Marxist gobbledegook. I was disgusted by it, and thought there must be a way back to the defence of western civilisation against these things. That's when I became a conservative. I knew I wanted to conserve things rather than pull them down."A Very British Hatchet Job, by Clement Knox. Los Angeles Review of Books 01/18/16:
… Far from being a Vernichtungskrieg waged without mercy upon the hallowed figures of the left-wing intellectual canon, this is a remarkably evenhanded hatchet job, with Scruton staying true to the promise made in the foreword “to explain what is good in the authors I review as well as what is bad.” This commendable sense of fairness might leave some readers who came expecting blood somewhat peeved.From Jargon to Incantation, by Laetitia Strauch-Bonart. Standpoint November 2015:
This is an outstanding and very necessary book. I may be biased, as I am the author’s translator into French, but I like his work because it is true, not the other way around. The only fault of the book is that it gives so much space to the sticky prose of the New Left. But that is a necessary evil. And Scruton’s fluid and lively sentences are such a relief. No wonder: you are at least reading something human. …
Some people will be shocked by Scruton’s book. They will see it as an ideological work targeting his enemies. But I beg them to open their Habermas, Lacan or Badiou, and to ask two things. Does this text mean something that I could explain to my educated friend? And does it make an honest attempt to understand history or society, and not a resentment-inspired and reality-denying fantasy?
If the answer is no, readers will have grasped Scruton’s point. Unless they really wish “to chew on the glutinous prose of Deleuze, to treat seriously the mad incantations of Žižek, or to believe that there is more to Habermas’s theory of communicative action than his inability to communicate it,” I challenge them to do so.
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If you are concerned by the state of the humanities and social sciences today, you must read this essay. Sir Roger Scruton, one of the most clear-headed and sensible thinkers of our times, has updated his 1985 essay Thinkers of the New Left. In this fascinating news version, he covers most of the modern-day intellectual impostors who have dreamed of and engineered the weakening of our culture, mores, and institutions. Scruton exposes fairly the basic theses of these authors, but wastes no time pointing out to the contradictions, non sequiturs, and plain absurdities found in critical theory, post-rationalism, post-colonial studies, etc. At several places, he uses spirited humour to complement his thorough analysis, without resorting to ad hominem attacks, name-calling, or facile parodies.
Despite his disapproval -- and often his contempt -- for the authors he studies, he is gracious at times, acknowledging the elegant style of Hobsbawn, the wide culture of Perry Anderson, and conceding that Foucault could have become a major historian if he had lived longer. However, he does not find anything positive to say about some of the figures covered in his essay, and he is often quite harsh in his pronouncements. For instance, he debunks well the pretensions of Habermas, but does not concede that his softening on many questions and his emphasis on communication have been an improvement as compared to the harsh Marxism of the 1960s.
While the scope of the book is wide, it does not cover all the radical sects that have emerged since WWII. For instance, Scruton does not discuss dependency analysis and liberation theology, approaches that are still very important in the developing world and that have been revived with the election of Pope Francis. Also absent are some orthodox Marxists of importance like Ralph Miliband, and influential post-Marxist reformers such as Anthony Giddens. He does not cover any of the myriad environmentalists who have decided from the 1980s on to pursue the fight against capitalism through ecological arguments. The main absents of the book are the promoters of sexual identity politics, especially radical feminism, eco-feminism, and other incarnations of gender theory. I do not know why Scruton have not scrutinized those schools of thought. Maybe third world ideology, sociological essays, environmentalist alarmism and gender advocacy are not philosophical enough for him. It is too bad that he could not guide us there as well. However, Scruton has set the tone and offered a courageous example of rigorous intellectual resistance that should inspire his readers to confront the new left avatars in all fields and disciplines.
Jean-François Rioux
Ottawa, Canada
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Piero della Francesca
5.0 out of 5 stars Un libro intelligente e necessarioReviewed in Italy on 24 March 2017
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Molto ben scritto e con evidente onestà intellettuale (l'opinione personale dell'autore, un conservatore, non è mai celata), questo libro illustra e commenta le ideologie di sinistra dalla loro nascita fino ai giorni nostri. Un antidoto al pericoloso nonsenso del liberismo di questi tempi, che tutto vuole distruggere (cultura, tradizione, senso di apparteneza a una patria, libertà di parola e di culto, ogni sentimento positivo che unisca una comunità variegata sotto un ideale più grande) in nome dello statalismo e del globalismo.
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Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left
Roger Scruton
4.05
1,291 ratings167 reviews
From one of the leading critics of leftist orientations comes a study of the thinkers who have most influenced the attitudes of the New Left. Beginning with a ruthless analysis of New Leftism and concluding with a critique of the key strands in its thinking, Roger Scruton conducts a reappraisal of such major left-wing thinkers as E. P. Thompson, Ronald Dworkin, R. D. Laing, Jurgen Habermas, Gyorgy Lukacs, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, Slavoj Žižek, Ralph Milliband, and Eric Hobsbawm. In addition to assessments of these thinkers' philosophical and political contributions, the book contains a biographical and bibliographical section summarizing their careers and most important writings.
In Fools, Frauds and Firebrands Scruton asks, What does the Left look like today, and how has it evolved? He charts the transfer of grievances, from the working class to women, gays, and immigrants, asks what we can put in the place of radical egalitarianism, and what explains the continued dominance of antinomian attitudes in the intellectual world. Can there be any foundation for resistance to the leftist agenda without religious faith?
Writing with great clarity, Scruton delivers a devastating critique of modern left-wing thinking.
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304 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1998
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Sir Roger Scruton was a writer and philosopher who has published more than forty books in philosophy, aesthetics and politics. He was a fellow of the British Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He taught in both England and America and was a Visiting Professor at Department of Philosophy and Fellow of Blackfriars Hall, Oxford, he was also a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Washington D.C.
In 2015 he published two books, The Disappeared and later in the autumn, Fools Frauds and Firebrands. Fools Frauds and Firebrands is an update of Thinkers of the New Left published, to widespread outrage, in 1986. It includes new chapters covering Lacan, Deleuze and Badiou and some timely thoughts about the historians and social thinkers who led British intellectuals up the garden path during the last decades, including Eric Hobsbawm and Ralph Miliband.
In 2016 he again published two books, Confessions of A Heretic (a collection of essays) and The Ring of Truth, about Wagner’s Ring cycle, which was widely and favourably reviewed. In 2017 he published On Human Nature (Princeton University Press), which was again widely reviewed, and contains a distillation of his philosophy. He also published a response to Brexit, Where We Are (Bloomsbury).
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Thinkers of the New Left
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Roger Scruton
T's review (2/5)
Sep 10, 2018
it was okbookshelves: borrowed
*29/11/22 Update
T
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November 17, 2023
*29/11/22 Update
Okay, so I'm glad to see that my poorly edited takedown of the late Roger Scruton's book has climbed to the top of the GoodReads' reviews for this book. Looking back at this review, I’ve realised that it’s much more of a summary, and notes reflecting my opinion at the time, rather than a review. I still stand by much of what I’ve written here, and having read more of Scruton and his enemies, I still feel that a better conversation could have been opened up by this book.
I can still remember ambling over my desk in my poorly insulated flat, scratching my head at the attacks and oversimplifications of thinkers I admired. Reading this also gave me an insight into a frankly underreported psychological phenomenon - the persecuted conservative. Roger claimed that he was attacked for the publication of his book, for daring to attack the academic Left - that great great powerful beast. He lost his reputation and also a lot of friends, "the book went down like a lead balloon, and [he] with it" he said in his interview with Polly Toynbee.
You see the late great Roger taught at the most prestigious colleges (Birkbeck and Oxford), received a Medal of Merit of the Czech Republic, a Knight Bachelor from the United Kingdom, the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland, the Commander's Cross with Star of the Hungarian Order of Merit, received money from Big Tobacco, spoke at Stanford's Hoover Institute, and had the ear of senior politicians, and wrote in some of the most prestigious journals and magazines. To quote Stewart Lee, "if that's being cancelled, I'll take a slice of that cancellation please!".
Now I don't like attacking people on account of their personal lives, jobs, or education, but Scruton's attacks in this volume are equally or even more below the belt. Scruton did very very well for himself, but his attempts to talk down his success and influence are not symptomatic of British modesty, they merely serve the interests of the culture war. A culture war which threatened his own field which he cherished and loved - the humanities. Reading this, one is reminded of how Ludwig Von Mises, in his Memoirs complained about his lack of recognition, despite being offered a job in the most prestigious bank in his country, coming from nobility, and similarly having the ear of the senior political leaders on the left and right.
I assume that what Scruton and other intellectual conservatives want is the recognition of their classmates. Scruton wanted ideological hegemony in one of the few areas where his team's success was not triumphant. No Marxist, postmodernist, postcolonialist intellectual has held high office in Britain, America, or in fact most of the world - but plenty of conservatives have. This fact doesn't move Scruton, but when he sees windbag professors doling out gluten-free texts on deconstruction and dialectical materialism (which most students certainly won't care for or read) he is furious. "Why should these pointyheads be reading Fanon, Foucault, and Freiere - why not Lord Acton, Hayek, and me?" Scruton balks.
And this is a shame, because whilst Scruton does occasionally make some honest critiques of his intellectual foes, it is swiftly drowned out by cheap political point scoring. For example, Scruton is correct when he says that Foucault's worldview is simplistic. However, saying that Foucault's concept of power is a rehashing of historical materialism is just plain wrong. Similarly, Scruton is onto something when he claims that Louis Althusser doesn't really engage with much of the literature which would be critical to his worldview, but better critiques of Althusser had already been made by people on the Left at that time (see The Poverty of Theory). So, to reel in on a reading list of books and articles read only by a small group of graduate students, to support the notion that the academic Left, which has almost no political, economic, and increasingly less social clout, controls the political narrative is just wrong.
Original review 10/09/18
This is the original 1985 version of 'Thinkers of the New Left' which caused poor old Mr Scruton the huge embarrassment he endured promptly after the book's publication. Roger Scruton still today bemoans the Leftist hegemony in culture, media, and universities (of course, conveniently leaving out the sphere of politics and economics). This is despite his status as one of the most important philosophers in the Anglosphere.
In this book, Scruton works through thinkers he decides are 'on the left', whether they be self-described Marxists, social democrats, left leaning liberals, anarchists, or simply thinkers popular with the academic Left (e.g. Foucault, whose later politics were aligned with free market neoliberalism). The 1980s version of the book differs slightly to the newer revision of the book 'Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left'. This volume is slimmer, and doesn't include Zizek and Badiou, but it does contain R.D. Laing and Gailbraith, who were taken out of the newer edition, as Scruton sees their influence as largely diminished.
Scruton begins his book giving the historical idea of 'the Left', arising out of French politics, some 300 years ago. Here, even before the book starts dissecting any of the thinkers, Scruton dares to trump out the long debunked lie that Chomsky denied the Cambodian genocide - a lie which was debunked years prior to the book's publication. Then he explains the absence of 'Godfather of the New Left' Herbert Marcuse, because he sees Eliseo Vivas' book 'Contra Marcuse (1971)' as a good enough rebuttal. This is surprising since Marcuse had a larger impact on the New Left than most of the thinkers Scruton touched on. Also, Marcuse's work has a pronounced focus on aesthetics, which is one of Scruton's main subjects of inquiry. Since Vivas' book is out of print and a pretty rare find, I'll have to take Scruton's word for it.
E.P. Thompson - Scruton attacks Thompson for being a Soviet apologetic, and sides with Leszek Kolakowski in his response to Thompson (reprinted in 'Is God Happy'). Thompson felt betrayed by Kolakowski's turn to anti Communism and religious apologetics. Thompson's reasoned that the Soviet countries were in their relative infancy, and when compared to other states at the time, it wasn't surprising that so much blood was shed in the creation of a New Society. Whilst Scruton does congratulate Thompson's magnum opus The Making of the English Working Class, he sees Thompson as too uncritical of Marxism, despite referencing his book 'The Poverty of Theory', which is quite literally a critique of many aspects of Marxism.
Ronald Dworkin - Scruton's critique of Dworkin is that his replacing of Conservative legality, as only leading to a sort of Leninist view of rights, which removes rights that don't allow for socialism. Of course, Dworkin is a left liberal who is critiquing liberalism's obsession with individual rights, over collective rights, so Scruton makes the logical leap that this will lead to totalitarianism.
Michel Foucault - Although Scruton has talked of his 'soft spot' for Foucault's later work on sexuality, he sees his philosophy as having an irreversible negative impact of academia and culture, especially Women's Studies and Cultural Studies. Scruton claims that Foucault's analysis is simplistic, narrowing everything down to power, and siding with the opressed (a criticism that holds some weight, especially in his earlier work). His analysis is a slightly more mature critique than Jordan Peterson's incoherent ramblings, but still suffers the same faults. I'm still quite unsure as to how Scruton gets to the conclusion that Foucault is a pseudo-Marxist and anarchist, considering that he died a classical liberal, spent his life criticising Marxism, and even went so far as to remove any ‘Marxist’ elements from his first book after its second publication. Here political pointscoring seemed more important to Scruton than content and rigour.
R.D. Laing - Laing is critiqued for blaming all of an individual's problems on society. Scruton sees Laing’s antipsychiatry philosophy as similar to Foucault and the early work of Thomas Szasz. Scruton spoils his critique by homogenising any philosophy critical of society as us versus them.
Raymond Williams - Scruton, in this chapter comes across similarly to Harold Bloom, criticising Williams as a resentful critic, forcing his ideology onto books, rather than analysing them from an aesthetic view. He also bemoans the fact that Williams presents his Marxist criticism as 'obvious'. But, don't all critics? Isn't that the point of critcisim, to present the work and it's understanding through a supposedly objective lens? Of course, Scruton doesn't see his idols F.R. Leavis or William Hazlitt as doing this.
Rudolf Bahro - The critique of Bahro here is pretty simple. Bahro saw the 'failure' of communism, and still maintained that he wanted 'Socialism with a human face'. Like Ernst Bloch, Bahro rejected Stalinism and hoped for a humanistic alternative. But for Scruton, this wasn’t based on principles, but ignorance.
Antonio Gramsci - I was shocked to see Gramsci. Whilst he wasn't even alive during the 'New Left' era. However, Scruton is right that Gramsci is essentially a product of the New Left. If it weren't for the utilisation of Gramsci's work by folks like Stuart Hall and Louis Althusser, he would probably would have been forgotten about. However, considering that fascism is defined as "anti-communism" I find it disturbing that Scruton attempts to link Gramsci's idea of 'praxis' with fascism, and claim that Gramsci's death helped the New Left invent the idea that fascism wasn't related to socialism. This is totally ahistorical.
Louis Althusser - A lot of Scruton's analysis here isn't substantive, and Scruton even makes a joke that Althusser "killed his wife for revisionism" - which is a bit classless mocking the mentally ill. The rest of the critique is on Althusser's work being boring, and refusing to work outside the Marxist paradigm. Scruton is correct, but again, a much more insightful conversation could have been had. Althusser was a poor philosopher, but his writings on Lacan, aesthetics, and Hegel could have been attacked in a much more interesting way.
Immanuel Wallerstein - Wallerstein was a surprising add to the list. Scruton doesn't provide an in-depth analysis of Wallerstein's world systems, but yammers on about his disagreements with the third worldist idea of adding an international aspect to the classical class analysis.
Jurgen Habermas - Scruton blames the rise of Frankfurt School theorists in Germany as being due to the German establishment repentance for Nazism. Scruton sees Habermas' effort to combine a linguistic theory with Critical Theory as simplistic, but clouded in academic jargon. Ironically, Scruton provides an assessment for this kind of 'academic Marxism' which has been made by plenty of activists before, namely that this kind of abstract theorising is so beyond the application of the working class that it ends up having very little value. Scruton is correct when he notes that "revolutionary elements... are slowly neutralised by boredom".
Perry Anderson - Prominent thinker and historian, educated at Eton and Oxford, Anderson encapsulates everything Scruton hates - the privileged leftist. Anderson is painted in this chapter as the left wing version of Oswald Spengler, a historian who forces his a priori worldview onto history, wedging all events into a poorly thought out metanarrative. Ideological biases in history are obviously an awkward subject, and I cannot comment on the veracity of any of Anderson's claims, because Scruton seldom brings any up. However, at least we can say that Anderson's biases are clear and he is open about them. Then, Scruton twists Anderson's comments about 'white emigres' like Ludwig Wittgenstein, Isaiah Berlin, and Melanie Klein, into a pseudo-antiSemitic rant, which is simply defamatory. Events later in Scruton’s life would make this accusation quite ironic.
Gyorgy Lukacs - Despite being one of the most underrated and overlooked Marxist theorists, Lukacs' work can certainly be criticised for it dogmatism and vulgarity (especially when it comes to his literary criticism). However, Scruton instead chooses to cherry pick Lukacs' quotes from works that the author later abandoned to show Lukacs' theological view of Marxism. Scruton again has some occasionally interesting points but he falls back on attacking Lukacs as a self-hating bourgeois, rather than asking questions about the applicability of Lukacs’ ideas, or their philosophical merit.
J.K. Galbraith - One of the few prominent left of centre economists to gain political power, Galbraith was a liberal institutionalist, but Scruton characterises him as a 'red under the bed'. This chapter sees Scruton doing his best to show Galbraith's work as based on simplistic day to day experiences, such as the idea that hierarchy in the workplace is based on power and not profit. Scruton is right that some of Galbraith’s ideas on power, the corporation, and price fixing are based on Galbraith’s pre-determined policy toolkit, but a much more fruitful analysis could have been made. Why not take a deeper look at the empirical effectiveness of Galbraith’s proposals?
Jean Paul Sartre - Like Foucault, Scruton has a soft spot for Sartre. However, his late political treatise 'Critique of Dialectical Reason' is trashed as a work which bears no relation to reality and simply acts as a dogmatic reassertion of Sartre' preformed political views. The book doesn't actually do what it promises on the tin, instead it avoids the contradiction between dialectical reasoning and formal logic. Furthermore, Scruton bashes Sartre for revealing his 'anti-bourgeois' attitude in his fictional work, which is something Scruton falls back on when he needs space to fill on the page.
What is Right - This final chapter goes on a rant about how the 'leftist' mentality and worldview is simply the amalgamation of hate and resentfulness, which offers a secular soteriology of utopia on earth. Boring, unoriginal, and unconvincing, Scruton cherry picks quotes to fit his view, and offers Conservative ideology of yesteryear in response.
Perhaps then, readers should remain in their tradition of not reading authors they disagree with politically, since attacking strawmen and homogenising opponents as enemies of civilisation is not a positive enterprise. Unfortunately it's Scruton doing it this time...
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Sam Eccleston
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January 10, 2016
For those, like me, who were forced to wade through the product of the 'nonsense machine' overseen by Lacan, Deleuze et al at University, this book is a long-overdue expose of perhaps the grandest example of intellectual charlatanry in modern times. Scruton ruthlessly exposes the absurd ideas and vacuous, incoherent prose commonly produced by prominent left wing intellectuals, and draws attention, where necessary, to the role many have played in defending the bloody tyrannies which characterised the Communist block until the last decade of the 20th century.
There may be those who find the frequency with which Scruton admits to not understanding what the authors he castigates mean in their texts unsettling, however, the lengthy extracts which punctuate this book should serve to illustrate why this is; the works in question are composed, chiefly, of lengthy strings of fragment sentences, few of which are clearly articulated to those that surround them, full of un-referenced pronouns, undefined technical terms, and descriptors and qualifiers in series with no obvious referent. When meaning is finally found, it is typically either trivial, patently absurd, beside the point, or morally repugnant. Scruton points this out over and over again.
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Owlseyes
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February 29, 2024
"Only someone raised in the anglosphere could believe, as I believed in the aftermath of 1968, that the political alternative to revolutionary socialism is conservatism"
in "How to be a conservative" by Roger Scruton
"The great intellectual advantage of socialism is obvious. Through its ability to align itself with ideals that every man can recognize, socialism has been able to perpetuate the belief in its moral purity, despite crime upon crime committed in its name. That a socialist revolution may cost millions of lives, that it may involve the wilful murder of an entire class, the destruction of a culture, the elimination of learning and the desecration of art, will leave not the slightest stigma on the doctrines with which it glorifies its action"
in: "The Meaning of Conservatism" by Roger Scruton
"Like many middle class people I came to Socialism through Marxism (to be more specific through Deutscher's biography of Trotsky). The trouble with Marxism is that it is fine if you make it your political servant but terrible if it becomes your political master."
Letter of Tony Blair (former Prime Minister of the UK) to Michael Foot in 1982
This is a collection of essays originally published in The Salisbury Review, three years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Though being overtly a sort of attack on the Marxist theoreticians, it includes anarchists, socialists, libertarians and other "types" [my expression] worried, as well, about "social justice".
(Edward Palmer Thompson)
(Ronald Dworkin)
(Raymond Henry Williams)
(Rudolf Bahro)
(György Lukács)
(Francis Rory Peregrine "Perry" Anderson)
(Ronald David Laing)
(Jürgen Habermas)
(John Kenneth Galbraith)
(Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre)
(Antonio Francesco Gramsci)
(Michel Foucault)
(Louis Pierre Althusser)
(Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein)
No, he didn't include Bernie Sanders.
Nor Marcuse...or Chomsky.
P.S. Nor this 'type' of "soft socialism" [Scruton's expression]
After a critical discussion of several international and prominent figures of the New Left, Scruton dedicates the last chapter of the book to defining basic differences between the New Left and the New Right. Of the former, I retain his view of this not-total respect for the institutions and a paradox at the heart of the New Left: a "desire for the total community" which goes hand in hand with "the fear for the 'others' who are the true source of social power".
As for the New Right, it believes "more in responsible government than in impersonal government, in the autonomy and personality of the institutions, in the Common Law".
Power is evil only when abused.
The book includes a sort of appendix with biographical and bibliographical data on the figures approached
Fools, Frauds and Firebrands by Roger Scruton review – a demolition of socialist intellectuals
in: https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
UPDATE
https://www.lawliberty.org/2019/06/03...
UPDATE
My condolences, in respect for his meaningful life.
http://dailynous.com/2020/01/12/roger...
https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2020/01...
https://amp.theguardian.com/books/202...
https://amp.theguardian.com/books/202...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/16/bo...
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2020/01/a...
https://newcriterion.com/issues/2020/...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/29/op...
UPDATE
Deconstructing the Left
https://europeanconservative.com/revi...
UPDATE
https://europeanconservative.com/arti...
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Rafael Munia
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December 8, 2016
If you want to read a manual on how to write an entire book arguing against straw man, this may interest you. If you are looking for a justification to not understanding or not wanting to read any of the authors mentioned in the book, this might interest you. If you are looking for a meaningful and honest critique of contemporary philosophical thought, then don't wast your time with this. This book is living proof of how much you can get away with when the audience does not understand the topic you are talking about.
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A
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June 14, 2022
9/10.
The year is 1936. The German working class, backing a certain Fuhrer, has seen an economic boom. With unemployment dropping from 33% to almost nil in three years, their leader has answered their prayers. A decade earlier in Italy, the working class rallies under the fasces to bring to power another Right-wing leader. The Marxists are in panic. "What about the iron laws of history? What about 'scientific' socialism? Why are the workers of the world not uniting?". Chaos reigns. Ideas brew. Yet out of that chaos spawned the monsters of our time.
Out came Gramsci from his prison cell. The working class that supported Mussolini and Hitler was actually not the "proletariat", but instead was the "petty bourgeoisie". They were fake workers. Just like how Stalin's meddlesome Ukrainian peasants were "revisionists", "reactionaries", "pseudo-Fascists", and "wreckers" instead of working men and women. Don't be silly.
These "petty bourgeoisie" have been infected by the "hegemony" of capitalist society. Capitalism (incarnated as the "bourgeoisie") has taken power over all the institutions — education, academia, government, media, and entertainment. Throwing away the "'scientific' socialist laws of history", Gramsci revised the Marxist historical thesis. Capitalism does not automatically produce the communist Utopia. Instead, the communists need to infiltrate the institutions, burrow their angelic heads in the husk of capitalism, and thus usurp the hegemony of the bourgeoisie. When that is completed, the revolution can come.
Such has been the history of the past 60 years. France, Germany, the United States, the UK — pretty much the whole West has been eaten alive by a deadly tapeworm, growing in its insides. Though, in actuality, there are two tapeworms, joyously collaborating in their parasitic feast. One spawned in France and another in Germany.
In France the tapeworm was commanded by the infantile narcissist Sartre and the anal-loving Foucault. Sartre, a key figure of "existentialism", had a wonderful thought: "existence precedes essence". Thus, there is no essence of man. There is no goal for man, nor any generally desirable state for all to strive for. All norms are slavery, and thus I must throw them all away, and find my "essence" in my own self-creation. The stupidity of this thought is apparent to anyone who has read the Greeks, the Romans, the Bible, or lived until they were 21. If you try to "live how you like", you begin to despise yourself. You feel like a disgusting waste. This is because there is a normative state for man to strive towards. When one falls away from it, one begins to become depressed, distraught, anxious, fat, and weak. They come together.
The solution is to discipline one's self. One must delay immediate gratification (prioritize your future self over your present self) and moderate one's pleasures. Bodily, you must push through the struggle of lifting to become strong. Mentally, you must train your concentration by reading. Instead of dissipating your energy in the pleasures of the moment, you must look to the future, set goals to become more virtuous, and pursue them to the best of your ability. You command your will, but you take directions from God. Giving you a moral structure (extremely close to that reached by the Romans and Greeks by thought), He tells you how to become virtuous. And in that state of virtue, the highest state of man, you will rejoice in the exercise of the virtues. You will rejoice in your strength when you can lift 250 lbs. You will rejoice in your willpower when you can fast for two days. You will rejoice in your service when you can accept orders from your boss with enthusiasm and promptness.
Against this refreshingness of health stands the anal-worshipper Foucault. Seeing "power" everywhere, eternally lurking and all-powerful, it controls his ever-important Self. "Power" creates norms for Foucault — norms he does not like. It puts prisoners in prison. It condemns homosexuals. It puts the mad in asylums. Thus, "power" (always abstract), categorizes man and condemns some to torment. The solution for Foucault is to show how normative structures are relative. If they are relative, then no one needs to follow them. Unfortunately for Foucault, this is false. Man has a certain nature. Given that nature, certain institutions are needed to constrain it. Man is not perfect (= original sin, the most obvious fact of existence), which creates a need for a lawful sovereign of society that keeps society functioning. Thus, we get prisons, asylums, and laws against homosexuality (which decreases birth rates). Unfortunately, Foucault did not understand this. In his sexual license, his great desire to be anally penetrated, he contracted AIDS and died. Lust and pride had destroyed him, though he would deny their existence.
Now to Germany. From here came the Frankfurt School, the German-Jewish sect from which came Adorno, Horkheimer, Wilhelm Reich, and Marcuse. Kicked out of Germany by Hitler, they took refuge in the US and UK. Here, in top university positions, they fomented the youth to revolt against "capitalism". Telling the youth that they were repressed by their families ("authoritarianism" — basically Nazism), repressed by monogamy and marriage (definitely Fascistic), and repressed by Christian faith ("The Father" = Authority = Hitler), the Frankfurt School told the youth that they should break free and find their "true selves". Once authority is trashed, capitalism must be too. Capitalism "reifies" one's desires, giving one the illusion that humans are things, and that things have agency. People worship goods and services, thus enslaving them to these material objects.
The solution is to break free from things. Instead of things, we need free love, gays, LSD, civil rights, and blue hair. And through these solutions, we saw an ever-more peaceful and loving society. Not. We now know of women's declining happiness and increasing anxiety since the 60s, the insatiability of BLM, the extreme mental illness of LGBTIDGAF, how drugs have destroyed our lower class, and how "free love" leads to ever-more sexually dissatisfied males (porn) and females.
Righteous authority creates order. When righteous authority is obeyed, peace reigns. Societies function smoothly. When the authority of God and the authority of the father are overthrown, you get all the negative consequences listed above.
The other critique of the Frankfurt School, that of the "slavery to things" that capitalism creates, has already been told of over 3000 years ago. In two words: "original sin". Man is enticed by external goods when it is irrational to desire them. They will never make him happy. The solution must be spiritual, as laid out in the Bible and by the Stoics, not political. The Frankfurt School wants a "new political order", but that, once again, means a pious dream of the Utopia of Equality. It's not going to happen. It will never happen. Natural human differences create natural hierarchy. Only through hierarchy, through the better and more-experienced commanding the lesser, will societies function. Just as ships need captains, armies need commanders, clubs need presidents, and companies need CEOs, so too do all of our institutions need leaders. Infantile revolt and pouting will do nothing but make you unhappy and your society dysfunctional. When you get a whole society doing such pouting, what do you get? The modern West.
———————————
As the Gramscian infiltration progressed through the 60s, 70s, and 80s, new academics with New-speak were welcomed into the university. Speaking magical gibberish, casting sophistical spells with their words, these academics led their students to gape in awe at their erudition. Twisting their minds in strange ways, learning the intricacies of New-speak, repeating slogan after slogan, the students became professors, and eventually continued the word revolution. None of the words really mattered. All that mattered was whether, out of the great nonsense factory, a Leftist thought was produced. The product — essential. The path — as complex as possible.
Thus students read their pseudo-mathematical Lacan, their abstraction-lord Deleuze, their Marxist set-theoretician Badiou, and their Slovenian spastic Zizek. Lacan, mouthing about the "big Other", castration, "The Real", and adding in mathematical formulas for extra spice, successfully convinced his students that he was a profound sage. Deleuze, telling the world of his revelation of the "Body without Organs" and that cause/effect is a deluded "binary" notion, was to show us the new path. No worries about rationality! Deleuze, in his Logic of Sense, tells us that "he is explicitly challenging the distinction between sense and nonsense, showing that the true use of language is expressive, not representational, so that nonsense is as much a part of communication as what is normally called sense". Right!
So students line up for their undergraduate and graduate degrees, and get fed this nonsense. Told to kowtow to their betters, they submit to of the great Ideas of the New Left. Never reading Plato, never reading the Stoics, having no idea what clear writing is, they crucify their minds on the cross of Nonsense. Their ideas, spawning out of a great, convoluted factory, always go to the Left. They always critique Western norms — the family, Christianity, heterosexuality, White people, and virtue.
These thinkers have no purpose but to produce ideology, the very thing they supposedly oppose. Critiquing the notion of objective truth, they proceed to recast truth in their own egalitarian image. Facts don't matter, and anyone who mentions them is automatically a heretic, to be immolated immediately. The intellectuals are destroying thought for egalitarianism. Poisoning the waters of thought, muddying them with a great mess of jargon, serves to force future academics to wade through these tortuous waters. The goal? At the end of the sluggish journey, create a resentful egalitarian. That's it.
Run away from these academics, these paragons of pseudo-thought. Don't be tricked by the hope that their reason-straining, nigh reason-destroying thought, will make you smarter. The end result of their thought is sickness — personal and societal.
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Steve
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October 22, 2015
The boot goes in.
Hobsbawn, Galbraith, Sartre, Foucault, Habermas, the Post-Modern left, Gramsci and Said, oh and Zizek. There's the body count. Scruton gives us thorough overviews of each of his victim's, calmly dissecting as he goes along.
Scruton is one of the few sane conservative minds of the day and all of his books are worth a look.
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David
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August 11, 2019
Why did I read this infuriating drivel? Know thy enemy, I guess. I’m all with Mister Scruton when it comes to his critique of the convoluted language employed by many writers of the left. But that critique can be thrown all the way back to the thinkers of antiquity, none of whom anyone would consider to be particularly left-leaning. I also concede the point that at times the ramblings of writers such as Deleuze or Lacan may indeed not get to any particular point and rather constitute intellectual self-infatuation. Watch a lecture by Lacan and it becomes blatantly obvious that the man was a bit of a self-adorning cock. Nevertheless, this book is nothing but an uninformed crusade of a conservative against left ideas. He calls for proof of these ideas? Well, somebody give me proof of the superiority of conservative ideas - I’m all ears. Philosophy by its nature does not particularly lend itself to ultimate proofs - it is after all fundamentally theoretical. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t have a contest of ideas. Also, dismissing left thinkers because they don’t start every book with a preface condemning Stalinism is silly. Granted, during certain eras there was a problem on the left of not disentangling left ideas from the cruelties of Soviet and other socialist regimes, but that doesn’t negate the validity of left thinking. And the eternal crying over the dominance of left thinking? Please, give me a break! Scruton is from the UK, a country that since the days of Thatcher has not looked at a left thinker with its ass. And I am yet to encounter many people in the circles I frequent who have read, much less advocate for any of the thinkers he criticizes.
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Stephen
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March 20, 2017
An excellent overview of leftist thinkers that, if you approach it with an open mind, will help you see their flaws rather than to dismiss them outright. Scruton is fair, if at times narrow in his approach. For me, he need not convince me of Badiou and Zizek; for the first, I’m already convinced he’s a fraud (compare his thoughts on Thermidor with a real historian like François Furet’s, and you’ll see the difference between a bumbler and a historian); for the second, I have no warmth or affection for his babbling, free-associative thinking just because he’s watched the same movies as we have, listened to the same pop music. Ronald Dworkin is the epitome of the dull, predictable house-style at New York Review of Books (I want my time back for having ever attempted him or John Rawls). Edward Said’s “orientalism” may have produced more misguided thinking among the left than ignorance of Islam itself. So for figures like these I didn’t need much persuading.
For the others, Scruton is almost too generous. I would have liked to see him attempt a kill-shot on Hobsbawm, in some other mode than “he never renounced his communism, therefore one must ignore him,” just to test my own thinking on him. But he praises the historian, while reserving his critique for Hobsbawm’s polemics alone. This has never concerned me, because there’s so much to gain from Hobsbawm otherwise. So as soon as I finished this book, I went back to reading the historian with the usual enthusiasm. Same for Foucault. Scruton admits his excellent style, his commitment as a real historian. Here he goes a little further in his critique, which I warmed up to, because his main issue is my main issue with Foucault: if inequality or power imbalance is constantly being referred to as “systemic”, then there’s really no point in fighting it, because power will always remain abstract, out of reach. Foucault falls back on this approach like a need, like most who need identity politics do. This is a hugely influential, categorical mistake.
Where I lost faith with Scruton is on Deleuze. Out of them all, he scores the best points on him. When most people think “Deleuze”, they think of his anti-capitalism writings with Guattari. These happen to be his most impenetrable, and even something of a joke played on us, which I blame Guattari the psychoanalyst for. It is true that it often feels like Deleuze is making it up as he goes along. Scruton sees this as a sign of fraudulence. I see it as his methodology of scaffolding, building and building upon historical ideas to discover what is true of the present. You often get the feeling of not knowing where he’s heading, but that’s where the excitement is, to discover the contiguous with the present through a fascinating mind. But I’ll allow this could be simply a matter of taste. Deleuze is outstanding on literary figures like Proust and Kafka, which Scruton doesn’t even acknowledge as part of the oeuvre. He doesn’t even seem aware of Deleuze the theologian, which is where a conservative can best read him for profit. Deleuze’s lapses aren’t Deleuze’s limitations, as they are for most every other writer. Scruton should have read him more carefully, and avoided the secondary literature altogether which he self-defeatingly relies on. Or simply leave Deleuze out of the book in the first place. “He baffles me” is not a counter-argument.
Likewise, with Perry Anderson and his New Left Review. He doesn’t seem to have recognized that they underwent a rethinking in 2000, having looked at the post-Cold War world and accepted a certain kind of defeat.
Forgivable though. The last thing in the world those of the left should be doing is whimpering into one’s blankies with Trump having kicked everyone’s ass and took names left and right. Now is the time to engage with conservative thinkers like Peter Hitchens, David Frum, Robert Kagan, and Roger Scruton et al for what they see and what we obviously don’t.
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Old Dog Diogenes
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September 18, 2022
Over decades of philosophical meandering the 'new left' have locked themselves in a box that is impenetrable from the outside world, and they look to control what is true and not true from the inside. They use subjectivity as a shield to guard themselves from all intellectual discord. Utilizing tactics such as new-speak and circular logic they look to paint an alternate view of reality, one where institutions, traditions, and authorities are all evil and society is to be seen always as victim and oppressor, and when confronted with their logical fallacies they fall back on subjectivism and general consensus within their box. This can be plainly seen played out in the Universities of the United States over the past 30 years. Where by way of the culture wars the left has gained substantial ground in the USA. Going as far as to attempt to create an utterly new conception of American history. Scruton’s description of Newspeak “casting spells” can be seen clearly in the American youth. Where there is no value placed on objective truth and all value placed on the left's idea of "social justice".
to quote Scruton:
There is no point to the old ideas of objectivity and universal truth; all that matters is the fact that we agree.
But who are we? And what do we agree about? Turn to Rorty’s essays, and you will soon find out. ‘We’ are all feminists, liberals, advocates of today’s radical causes and the open curriculum; ‘we’ do not believe in God, or in any inherited religion; nor do the old ideas of authority, order and self-discipline carry weight for us. ‘We’ make up our minds as to the meaning of texts, by creating through our words the consensus that includes us. There is no constraint on us, beyond the community to which we have chosen to belong. And because there is no objective truth but only our own self-engendered consensus, our position is unassailable from any point of view outside it. Pragmatists not only decide what to think; they protect themselves from whoever doesn’t think the same.
and Later:
In place of objectivity we have only ‘inter-subjectivity’—in other words, consensus. Truths, meanings, facts and values are now regarded as negotiable. The curious thing, however, is that this woolly-minded subjectivism goes with a vigorous censorship. Those who put consensus in the place of truth quickly find themselves distinguishing the true from the false consensus. And inevitably the consensus is ‘on the left’. . . .
Thus the ‘we’ of Rorty rigorously excludes all conservatives, traditionalists and reactionaries. Only liberals can belong to it; just as only feminists, radicals, gay activists and anti-authoritarians can take advantage of deconstruction. . . . The inescapable conclusion is that subjectivity, relativity and irrationalism are advocated not in order to let in all opinions, but precisely so as to exclude the opinions of people who believe in old authorities and objective truths. This is the short cut to Gramsci’s new cultural hegemony: not to vindicate the new culture against the old, but to show that there are no grounds for either, so that nothing remains save political commitment...
The final result of the culture wars has been an enforced political correctness, by which the blasted landscape of art, history and literature is policed for the residual signs of racist, sexist, imperialist or colonialist ways of thinking.”
Anyone who is paying any attention—to the university, to the media, to popular literature (especially the cesspit of YA), to the arts, and to public commemoration—will recognize the truth in this description. But of course this “enforced political correctness” no longer plays out solely in academic institutions. One wonders what the next stage of this will look like. We are already seeing some of it.
and in Scruton's own gloomy words,
“We have entered a period of cultural suicide.”
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Christopher Blosser
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May 3, 2016
The original publication of Scruton's Thinkers of the New Left in 1985 reportedly "brought his career as an academic philosopher to an end", say Roger Scruton in an interview with Ricochet. This is not to say he was censored outright ("the people on the left don't 'censor' -- they look with compassion on your stupidity, take you quietly to the side, and recommend quietly that you retire for a while"). Rather, so great was the negative outcry from the left that his publisher eventually surrendered all copies, removed them from bookshops and relocated them to Scruton's garden.
Call him a sucker for punishment, but Scruton recently updated his infamous book for republication in late 2015, "Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left" (the snarky title somewhat betraying what is actually a substantial intellectual survey) -- in Scruton's own words, "I add a consideration of Hobsbawm and Adorno, touch on Rorty and Said, and explore the Parisian nonsense machine, with Deleuze, Guattari, Lacan and Badiou. I end with Žižek". Of course, Scruton himself appears well-primed to bear the brunt of another round of hyperbolic abuse by all parties offended.
Personally, I enjoyed this immensely, both for Scruton's dry, British wit as well as for the sheer breadth of intellectuals covered in his survey, a smattering of whom I've acquainted myself with in college but have little desire to pursue further. Suffice to say both as a husband, father and breadwinner, I've significantly less time to read as I did in college and am rather more judicious of what books to occupy my time. If anything, Scruton should be duly credited for his incredible display of patience and constitution in wading through book after book and thousands of pages of left-wing theorizing, or what he dubs the deliberately-calculated "the nonsense machine" -- providing a welcome reminder of what I really haven't missed, and don't regret missing, in my failure to further engage this particular genre of "scholarship").
Beyond the critical survey and skewering of the icons and idols of the left, what I particularly appreciated is the closing chapter, "What is Right?", where Scruton briefly lays out his own principles and political philosophy in response.
For Scruton, it is precisely in the leftist intellectual's inclination to elevate theory above reality, to immerse himself so completely in a class-war against the phantasm of the "bourgeoise" -- that they inevitably blind themselves to the concrete, tangible reality of the common man in front of them, and in such a way that, historically, countless acts of violence and murder have been sanctioned in pursuit of a theoretical, abstract ideal. (Time and again, Scruton returns to this point of how such intellectuals have quite willingly and consciously white-washed and carried water for the most brutal and bloody of regimes, all in the name of the "revolution").
Moreover, it is the dearth of recognition left-wing theory gives to the "little platoons" that Scruton abhors -- "all that makes society possible -- law, property, custom, hierarchy, family, negotiation, government, institutions". It is these mediating institutions of civil society, however imperfect and flawed, that exist and stand between the individual and the "totalizing vision" of the coercive state, and it is through the free assembly that we come together in such civil institutions that "politics is softened, and people are protected from the worst kinds of dictatorship."
To quote Scruton at length:
"… colleges and schools, of clubs, regiments, orchestras, choirs and sporting leagues – all of which offer, along with the benefit of membership, a distinctive ethos of their own. By joining these things you not only put yourself under the conventions, traditions and obligations of the group; you acquire a sense of your own worth as a member, and a bond of association that gives meaning to your acts. Such institutions stand between the citizen and the state, offering discipline and order without the punitive sanctions through which the state exerts its sovereignty. They are what civilization consists in, and their absence from the socialist states of modern times is entirely explicable, since free association makes it impossible to achieve the ‘equality of being’ towards which socialists aspire. To put the matter simply: association means discrimination, and discrimination means hierarchy.
My alternative political philosophy, therefore, would advocate not only a distinction between civil society and the state, but also traditions of institution building outside the control of the state. Social life should be founded in free association and protected by autonomous bodies, under whose auspices people can flourish according to their social nature, acquiring the manners and aspirations that endow their lives with meaning. That ‘right-wing’ vision of politics will not be devoted to the structures of government only, or to the social stratifications and class divisions that are obsessively referred to on the left. It will be largely devoted to the building and governance of institutions, and to the thousand ways in which people enrich their lives through corporations, traditions and spheres of accountability."
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P.S. For a more serious and somewhat less polemical work of Scrutons, see his A Short History of Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Wittgenstein 2001.
See alsoThinking for England, by Nicholas Wrote. The Guardian 10/28/00:
For Roger Scruton, as for so many of his generation, the Paris riots of May 1968 were the defining political moment of his life. He was in the Latin Quarter when students tore up the cobblestones to hurl at the riot police. His friends overturned cars and uprooted lamp-posts to erect the barricades. Representatives of his own discipline, old philosophers like Marx and new ones like Foucault, were providing the intellectual fuel for the fire raging on the ground.
As he watched the events unfold from his apartment window, and listened to his friends, drunk on revolutionary hope and excitement, Scruton found his own emotions and opinions crystallising. "I suddenly realised that I was on the other side," he says. "What I saw was an unruly mob of self-indulgent middle-class hooligans. When I asked my friends what they wanted, what were they trying to achieve, all I got back was this ludicrous Marxist gobbledegook. I was disgusted by it, and thought there must be a way back to the defence of western civilisation against these things. That's when I became a conservative. I knew I wanted to conserve things rather than pull them down."A Very British Hatchet Job, by Clement Knox. Los Angeles Review of Books 01/18/16:
… Far from being a Vernichtungskrieg waged without mercy upon the hallowed figures of the left-wing intellectual canon, this is a remarkably evenhanded hatchet job, with Scruton staying true to the promise made in the foreword “to explain what is good in the authors I review as well as what is bad.” This commendable sense of fairness might leave some readers who came expecting blood somewhat peeved.From Jargon to Incantation, by Laetitia Strauch-Bonart. Standpoint November 2015:
This is an outstanding and very necessary book. I may be biased, as I am the author’s translator into French, but I like his work because it is true, not the other way around. The only fault of the book is that it gives so much space to the sticky prose of the New Left. But that is a necessary evil. And Scruton’s fluid and lively sentences are such a relief. No wonder: you are at least reading something human. …
Some people will be shocked by Scruton’s book. They will see it as an ideological work targeting his enemies. But I beg them to open their Habermas, Lacan or Badiou, and to ask two things. Does this text mean something that I could explain to my educated friend? And does it make an honest attempt to understand history or society, and not a resentment-inspired and reality-denying fantasy?
If the answer is no, readers will have grasped Scruton’s point. Unless they really wish “to chew on the glutinous prose of Deleuze, to treat seriously the mad incantations of Žižek, or to believe that there is more to Habermas’s theory of communicative action than his inability to communicate it,” I challenge them to do so.
New Left Ideas and Their Consequences
, by Sean Haylock. Crisis 01/25/16:
It has become a commonplace in some circles that postmodern writing is nothing but nonsensical logorrhoea, deliberately opaque and utterly pretentious. Scruton certainly presents some astonishing examples of just this phenomenon, especially from Jürgen Habermas and Gilles Deleuze, both titans of postmodern academia (Deleuze is responsible for the sentence: “The eternal return eliminates that which renders it impossible by rendering impossible the transport of difference”). But Scruton also pays due compliment to works by his targets which display genuine literary accomplishment. Sartre’s account of his childhood, Les mots, is “a masterpiece of autobiography.” Michel Foucault is praised for “the synthesizing poetry of his style” and his last work, the three volume History of Sexuality, hailed for its discovery, as far as Foucault’s scholarly practice is concerned, of careful analysis and diligent citation. The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, currently much in vogue, “writes perceptively of art, literature, cinema, and music, and … always has something interesting and challenging to say.” Such compliments aren’t concessions to the ideologies that drive these philosophers. I wonder how many ardent Marxists would be prepared to acknowledge the poetry in Scruton’s prose.
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Fools, Frauds and Firebrands by Roger Scruton review – a demolition of socialist intellectuals
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This polemic adopts the abusive and paranoid style it decries in its leftwing opponents
Steven PooleThu 10 Dec 2015
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The New Left is rather old news. Hence the title change for this new version of Roger Scruton’s critique of rampant intellectual socialism, which was originally published in 1985 as simply Thinkers of the New Left. Since then, RD Laing and Rudolf Bahro are out; Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, Edward Said, Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek are in. Scruton is brilliant at the patient demolition, in sorrowful yet witty tones, of wobbly conceptual edifices. Yet the zingier, more knockabout new title promises more fury than the book supplies. The only outright “fool” here, in Scruton’s view, is the psychoanalyst Lacan; and only the Austro-Hungarian Marxist critic György Lukács is judged downright wicked. The rest, Scruton diagnoses mainly as wrong though very clever, or wrong and not very clever, or just shatteringly boring.
It is an art to condemn at length the boringness of a thinker without becoming boring oneself, and Scruton perhaps doesn’t quite manage it in his discussion of Jürgen Habermas, the German intellectual and relentless theorist of the “public sphere”. (Scruton does allow, archly, that “interesting ideas surface in the great waste-paper basket of Habermas’s prose”.) Another chapter deals with the “nonsense machine” allegedly constructed in Paris by the poststructuralist gang of Louis Althusser, Lacan and Deleuze. Scruton thinks Lacan and Deleuze were both frauds, and that the latter’s popularity has helped reduce the landscape of the modern humanities to “the intellectual equivalent of the aftermath of the Somme” (Really?). So there is not much to chew on, after Scruton has deftly sketched the historical context and produced this amazing image: “The monsters of unmeaning that loom in this prose attract our attention because they are built from forgotten theories, forged together in weird and ghoulish shapes, like gargoyles made from the debris of a battlefield.”
That is quite something, and of a piece with other gleefully dark put-downs elsewhere (“a morose prowling of the intellect around an inexplicable shrine”). But the problem in general with denouncing people as frauds and charlatans is that you might be paying them too much intellectual credit, and so too little moral credit. Perhaps they really believed this stuff, in which case they were idiots but not dishonest. This book is at its best, by contrast, when Scruton is engaging with writers whom he evidently respects, however much he disagrees with them.
So the historians Eric Hobsbawm and EP Thompson are praised for “the brilliance of their writing” but marked down for their determination to use “historical understanding as an instrument of social policy” (Though who doesn’t?). The legal theorising of the “brilliant” Ronald Dworkin sees Scruton arguing that it contains a “special pleading for judicial activism, provided that the activists are political liberals”. Jean‑Paul Sartre is celebrated for his writing on freedom and sex before his later political interventions are lamented. Of Michel Foucault, Scruton writes alluringly: “the synthesising poetry of his style rises above the murky sludge of leftwing writing like an eagle over mud-flats”. His work is marred by “a great suspicion”, but Scruton finds intellectual redemption in Foucault’s last books, on sexuality. Occasionally, though, one does get the sense that the book hasn’t been updated thoroughly enough, as when Scruton refers to “a consensus of moral conviction against pornography”. There might have been such a consensus in 1985; there certainly isn’t now.
Perhaps as a result of intellectual Stockholm syndrome, Scruton occasionally adopts just that abusive and paranoid style he decries in his opponents. In early communism, he observes, “labels were required that would stigmatise the enemies within and justify their expulsion: they were revisionists, deviationists, infantile leftists, utopian socialists”. Just so, Scruton stigmatises his own enemies in the language of mental illness: Žižek emits “mad incantations”; Althusser’s writing is “like a lunatic trapped in an imaginary cage” (to be fair, Althusser did murder his wife). Lacan, meanwhile, was not merely a charlatan but, it says here, “a crazy charlatan”.
And paranoid? Well, there is apparently a vast left-wing conspiracy to silence conservative voices. He suggests that one arm of this conspiracy is that multimillion-selling propaganda sheet, the New York Review of Books. This, even though Bloomsbury is publishing Scruton’s book with quite a fanfare, and he has received respectful notices over the years in this very paper. Other high-profile rightwingers – say, Niall Ferguson – don’t seem to have much trouble getting work these days either.
View image in fullscreenJean-Paul Sartre, initially lauded by Scruton but later lamented. Photograph: CorbisScruton indulges in a paranoid style of reading, too. Hurrying on from Deleuze’s respected works on Spinoza and Kant, he decides to locate “the true nature of his thinking” elsewhere. Similar treatment is accorded Žižek. Scruton introduces this impish superstar of the philosophical commentariat with a purr of approval: Žižek is “seriously educated”, he “writes perceptively of art, literature, cinema and music”, and “he always has something interesting and challenging to say” about current events. And yet in the next paragraph, Žižek is a global “nuisance”. So where must we look for his intellectual sin? Why, in “the true content of his message”: in “his little pellets of poison”, such as Žižek’s notorious claim that Hitler was “not violent enough”.
All quotation is selective and all quotation is out of context — still, you cannot really get away with quoting such a deliberately provocative formulation of Žižek’s without saying what he means. Žižek is arguing that it would have been better had Hitler engaged in a thoroughgoing remaking of social and political institutions, rather than a programme of industrialised mass murder. By refusing to explain this, Scruton disingenuously invites the reader to suppose that Žižek thinks Hitler ought to have killed more people.
Just like his communist-minded opponents, then, Scruton seems to think exclusively in terms of an embattled “us” versus a homogenous “them”. The overall effect is quite gloomy. Sadly not countenanced within these pages is the possibility that a person might not care for Lacan or Deleuze but still admire Sartre, Jacques Derrida and Žižek — and, for that matter, Scruton.
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