Fools, Frauds and Firebrands
Thinkers of the New Left
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- £11.99
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- £11.99
Publisher Description
A devastating critique of New Left thinking.
In Fools, Frauds and Firebrands, Roger Scruton first surveys and then deconstructs the golden idols of left wing thought from the 1960s to the present day. He dissects the hollow works of Hobsbawm and E. P. Thompson, Galbraith and Dworkin, Sartre and Foucault and exposes the lack of coherence in the works of Althusser, Lacan, Deleuze, Badiou and Žižek.
Scruton ponders why the humanities have become so unambiguously aligned to the left, and reveals how fully such thinking has seized the academy in its grasp. In this provocative, compelling and highly entertaining book he explains why empty rhetoric abounds over careful analysis and blatant nonsense over respectable logic, in a shattering demolition of some of today's most fashionable philosophers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Eminent British philosopher and polymath Scruton gives a sharp-edged, provocative critique of leading leftist thinkers since the mid-20th century. In this revision of his earlier polemic Thinkers of the New Left (1985), he examines John Kenneth Galbraith on consumerism, Richard Rorty on pragmatism, Antonio Gramsci on hegemony, Edward Said on colonialism, and Slavoj i ek on the Other. He also looks at influential French intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan. For the left, according to Scruton, the source of injustice lies not in human nature but in established power and dominant classes. He notes that leftists exalt principles of equality, emancipation, and social justice but claims that they rarely describe actual or corrective models of social order. Through a "relentless campaign of intimidation," he writes, the left tries to make the right unacceptable, yet gives no coherent definition of what constitutes it. If any critics deviate from its premises, "you are not an opponent to be argued with, but a disease to be shunned." Scruton finds relief from contemporary anomie in the rule of law and promotion of liberty. This complex and erudite study is neither an easy read nor a reactionary screed. The overly zippy, alliterative new title does not indicate the depth or seriousness of the analysis.
