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Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left Hardcover – December 8, 2015

by Roger Scruton (Author)
4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 857 ratings
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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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  1. Print length
    304 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Bloomsbury Continuum
  4. Publication date
    December 8, 2015
  5. Dimensions
    5.84 x 1.05 x 8.53 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    1408187337
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1408187333
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

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"The book is a masterpiece, its rather too clever title notwithstanding. 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." ―Wall Street Journal

"Scruton’s book is not the dispassionate examination and measured assessment of philosophical arguments typical of analytic philosophers. It is a polemical dissection and indictment of the perceived destructive aims and tactics of the left. Earlier chapters on Sartre and Foucault, and on members of the Frankfurt School, particularly Adorno, are the most engaging." ―Samuel Freeman, The New York Review of Books

“Eminent British philosopher and polymath Scruton gives a sharp-edged, provocative critique of leading leftist thinkers since the mid-20th century . . . complex and erudite.” ―Publishers Weekly

“Caustic, highly recherché, and simply great fun to read for the questing intellectual soul.” ―Kirkus Reviews

"[H]onestly assesses the political and philosophical contributions of the Left [and] 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

About the Author

Professor Roger Scruton is a graduate of Jesus College, Cambridge. He has been Professor of Aesthetics at Birkbeck College, London, and University Professor at Boston University. He is currently a visiting professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford and Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Washington, D.C. He has published a large number of books, including some works of fiction, and has written and composed two operas. He writes regularly for the Times, the Telegraph, and Spectator,and was for many years wine critic of the New Statesman.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Bloomsbury Continuum; F First Edition (December 8, 2015)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1408187337
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1408187333
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 15.7 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.84 x 1.05 x 8.53 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 857 ratings

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Roger Scruton

Roger Scruton

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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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4.6 out of 5 stars
4.6 out of 5
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Top reviews from the United States

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 May 23, 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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Mark Mcintire
5.0 out of 5 stars John Kenneth Galbraith gets a good waxing. Originally published in 1985 as simply Thinkers ...
Reviewed in the United States on July 21, 2017
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Power is Truth: The New Left Credo — Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands Review
July 9, 2017 First Published in The EC Journal
|
Mark McIntire

Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands, written by Roger Scruton, is precisely the book that every student of modern political science and/or economics should read. Even if you don’t know the difference between a ‘dialectic’ and a ‘praxis,’ your lack of deep philosophical literacy will not impede the read. With tong and scalpel, Scruton offers the reader a narrative answer to a simple question. How did the very core idea of Western culture and law change from individual natural rights, seeking only truth, to contrived group rights, seeking only power?

Scruton wants one's inference to tumble out of these pages at the end. Fake news, identity politics, corporate shame, the evil 1%, globalism, Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ+, ANTIFA, and now our shooting cultural war all stem from the clever theology of group rights ordained by German theologian Karl Marx. With relentless surgical precision, philosophy professor Roger Scruton peels away layers of decayed Marxian mumbo-jumbo by later day acolytes from Sartre to Habermas, from Dworkin and Deleuze, to Lucan and Zizek, in his book Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands. Even JFK’s pet economist, John Kenneth Galbraith gets a good waxing.

Originally published in 1985 as simply Thinkers of the New Left before the collapse of the old Soviet Union, this iteration of Scruton’s communist autopsy drills down to the core presumptions of communism’s decrepit corpse. Resting on sound philosophical research, his grammar, syntax, and diction are the results of immaculate conception. If you crave French nuanced literary criticism, then this book is not for you. If, however, you crave a road map of the intellectual car crashes that led us to our common social fatality, then, by all means, get this book.

Though brutal in his exorcism of Marxian devils, Professor Scruton takes patient pains to give both substance and style credit where credit is due. In this, he demonstrates more character virtue than the far-left academics who vindictively purged him from his university teaching and writing career.

But ‘Old Left’ Communism did not die at the hands of ‘Iron Lady’ Margaret Thatcher, ‘Solidarity’ inspired Pope John Paul II, and Ronald Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’. Indeed, it merely rebranded thanks to the zealous priesthood of the ‘New Left’ Marxists in Europe and America. Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands, is the intellectual chronicle of those seminary and post-ordination days for that priesthood. One subtext of this work is the strong evidence that last century’s Marxian theology has become this century’s New Left religion. These postulants, scholastic monks, and deacons insinuated themselves into contemporary politics as revolutionary socialist bishops, cardinals, and even a Pope in the person of rabid atheist Richard Dawkins. Antonio Gramsci is their martyred saint who rotted away in Mussolini’s prison as public enemy number one of the Roman Catholic Church. This communist priesthood created a socialist workers society very much like the bourgeoisie society they waged jihad to destroy, unsuccessfully as it turns out.

Limited space here does not permit dragging the reader over the alpine philosophical mountains Scruton climbs in this work, but a few passages are intelligible to any educated reader conscious of the changes in our contemporary politics. One of those is Scruton’s meticulous documentation of how modern fascists and communists have much in common despite their obvious differences in this passage:

“Communism, like Fascism, involved the attempt to create a mass popular movement and a state bound together under the rule of a single party, in which there will be total cohesion around a common goal. It involved the elimination of opposition, by whatever means, and the replacement of ordered dispute between parties by clandestine ‘discussion’ within the single ruling elite. It involved taking control – ‘in the name of the people’ – of the means of communication and education, and instilling a principle of command throughout the economy. Both movements regarded law as optional and constitutional constraints as irrelevant – for both were essentially revolutionary, led from above by an ‘iron discipline.’ “

Readers can glean from this sample, Scruton’s content, style, and comprehensive intellect.

After warning the reader that ‘this is not a word-mincing book’ in the terse introduction, Professor Scruton front-loads a strong thesis, to wit, “Liberation and social justice have been bureaucratized.” It’s not so much the clever dialectical pretzel of Marx that is responsible as much as it’s those who hijacked it for raw, brutal, murderous power. The rest of the book is a series of premises in the form of chapters deductively and inductively hammering home that conclusion with erudite blows of scholarship. This thesis is reiterated near the end as:

“To put the point another way: the Marxist theory of history, which explains all historical development as the product of changes in the economic infrastructure, is false. Historical development is as much the outcome of political will (as our ‘bourgeois’ historians have always insisted) as the outcome of ‘material’ processes.”

While acknowledging that some fascist governments were democratically elected, all Communist governments came to power by the coup d’etat (i.e. murder and mayhem). Best available estimates today on the number of humans murdered by the communist intellectual great, great grandchildren of Karl Marx range from 170 to 200 million.

Like some erudite tour bus driver, Scruton drives the reader around the intellectual wasteland of ‘group think’, ‘Orwellian Newspeak’ the ‘nonsense machine’ invented by Louis Althusser, and Gilles Deleuze, the scorched-earth attack on our ‘colonial’ inheritance by Edward Said, and the recent revival of ‘the communist hypothesis’ by Alain Badiou and motor mouth Slavoj Žižek. The intellectual landscape resembles something like Hiroshima after the bomb. Around every corner are burned out conceptual buildings of law, tradition, custom, enterprise, family, or religion, all made from the same atomic accelerant — the irrepressible individual human will for individual freedom nurtured by the false bourgeois society.

Scruton’s tour bus struggles mightily up the steep hill of Jürgen Habermas, the German intellectual and relentless theorist of the ‘public sphere’ (‘group-think’ in America) only to fall back down again exhausted. Like Sisyphus trudging after his boulder, Scruton only takes pleasure in his descriptions of Marxian ‘nonsense’ by accepting them as nonsense. The tour bus even has a stop at a bombed out psychiatric clinic where French intellectual fraud Louis Althusser died after strangling his wife to death. He claimed she was a Marxist ‘revisionist.’ Can’t have that now, can we?

Thus, the odd post-Marxian creatures Sir Scruton details for us constitute part zoo, part theme park, part waterboarding torture chamber, and part Cambodian killing field. There’s something for every political fetish here in Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands. Near the end of the book, special ridicule is reserved for the New-Left’s canonized saint, Italian firebrand Antonio Gramsci who wrote his most potent social poison in prison.

“There is another reason for Gramsci’s canonization, however. He provided the theory that promised both to solve the problem of ‘so-called great men’, and also to establish the intellectual’s right to govern. In The Modern Prince and other writings from his prison years he moved on from Leninist sloganizing and devoted himself to the task of reconciling the Marxist theory of history and society with a philosophy of political action. Gramsci referred to his theory as ‘the philosophy of praxis’, and developed it in opposition to the ‘vulgar materialism’ of Bukharin.”

It may be that the matter/spirit dialectic that Hegel twisted into a transcendental pretzel actually is the poison tree of modern western philosophy and its cultural fruit. It may be right and proper that Marx tried to chop it down. Sir Scruton will have none of that balderdash, tommyrot, eyewash speculation. Ultimately, that is the major defect in the two hundred and eighty-eight pages of this seductive decapitation of the Marxian ‘nonsense machine.’ But if that is the only defect in Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands, then we can cut Scruton some slack. After all, there’s just so much turgid nonsense a philosopher can wade through in a single book.

One final matter of some importance. In the last two chapters, 9 and 10, Professor Scruton correlates New Left’s Marxian religion with today’s constant upheaval, by balkanized mobs demanding special rights rather than equal rights. If you can’t quite imagine why these eternal dissenters, itinerant protesters, occupiers of streets, buildings, bridges, and universities cannot be appeased or mollified, then you haven’t analyzed Žižek.

Today, the default political correctness requires the intellectuals and workers to unite and ‘stand up’ for x, y, or z. It really doesn’t matter what cause x, y, or z reference, just as long as law and society is disrupted, resisted, and hopefully destroyed completely making way for a classless, genderless, Godless, workers’ paradise. Scruton illuminates the cause. It’s the constant state of ‘revolution’ of ‘us’ (the 99%) against ‘them’ (the 1%) necessary to destroy the capitalist bourgeoisie society that created them, educated them, and trusted them to seek truth. Instead, there is a ’constant struggle’ for only power since there is no other ‘truth.’ Might makes ‘right,’ and the only thing that matters is are you on the ‘right’ side of the revolution to overthrow the enslaving bourgeoises.

“Repeatedly in what follows we will encounter the Newspeak of left-leaning thinkers. Where conservatives and old-fashioned liberals speak of authority, government and institutions, those on the left refer to power and domination. Laws and offices play only a marginal part in the left-wing vision of political life, while classes, powers and the forms of control are invoked as the root phenomena of the civil order, together with the ‘ideology’ that mystifies those things and rescues them from judgement. Newspeak represents the political process as a constant ‘struggle’ concealed by fictions of legitimacy and allegiance. Peel away the ideology, and the ‘truth’ of politics is revealed. The truth is power, and the hope of deposing it.”

In “What is Right?,” the final chapter, Sir Roger answers the obvious criticism that any intelligent reader has been mulling for the prior 273 pages. With his blistering refutation of those Marxian priests that have taken perpetual vows to tear down society, has not Sir Roger become just like them offering nothing positive and only negative complaints? To say that he rises to the challenge would be an injustice. In quick bold brush strokes, Scruton paints the vibrant, textured landscape of representation and law resting on objective principles of individual human nature, individual freedom, acceptance of human imperfection while striving for it, freedom to buy or sell your labor, goods or services, freedom to join a group or not, freedom to organize a union or fund a corporation, freedom to worship a God if you will it, freedom to risk with potential for reward, freedom to enjoy the prospect of success and/or failure at the mercy of reality, truth, goodness, and beauty.

The reader can actually read just that last chapter and still drink the deep waters of philosophical wisdom between the covers of this book. It remains one of the only works in print which defends the notion that our individual life of ideas in not the sole province of the New Left apostles in the academy. He may be right, but not by half.

Prof. Mark McIntire
Contributor

Professor Mark McIntire teaches philosophy at Santa Barbara City College and publishes acerbic criticisms as The Meddlesome Priest. He also hosts a weekly radio program Minds That Matter on AM 1290 KZSB. His e-text Reason Argue Refute: Critical Thinking About Anything is available in all digital formats from Amazon and on Apple iBooks
39 people found this helpful
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The F7 Pawn
4.0 out of 5 stars Deconstructing Deconstructionism
Reviewed in the United States on July 13, 2018
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Conservative philosopher Roger Scruton tries to make sense of the nonsense spouted by neo-Marxist intellectuals in the 20th Century. Despite heroic efforts and his own limpid prose, Scruton comes up short; even he cannot translate for us mere mortals the barkings of madmen. What is clear, however, is that these worthies are not trying to persuade of us of anything, they are merely engaged in a conversation (or shouting match) with one another over the correct theoretical path to emancipation. Like Tom Wolfe in his send-up of modern art in The Painted Word in which the “artist” disdains the viewer, modern Marxist intellectuals use Newspeak to obfuscate and obscure meaning deliberately. After all, this gibberish, a sort of secularized speaking in tongues, is meant for the anointed and not the common man on whose behalf they claim to speak. Scruton has none of it and points out the humbug of it all. The truth is, these intellectuals don’t understand what they are saying let alone that of their colleagues; and yet they nod along, stroking their chins, fooling their small yet slavish followers into believing that they’ve seen deeply into the human condition. Anyone doubting this is high-grade quackery need only consider Alan Sokal’s hilarious, jargon-laden 1996 hoax in which he got the editors of a prestigious academic journal to buy off on the postulate that physical laws were merely social constructs. Post-modernism at its finest, indeed. Similarly, this book is not always an easy read, but it is well-written, fair (as fair as one can be under the circumstances), and deeply researched. Highly recommended.
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atf
5.0 out of 5 stars Admirable!
Reviewed in Germany on October 16, 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 nube
Reviewed in Spain on August 26, 2020
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Excelente
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DWill82
5.0 out of 5 stars Worth a read to understand how dangerous modern academia is
Reviewed in Australia on September 17, 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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JFR
5.0 out of 5 stars An inspiration and an example
Reviewed in Canada on January 30, 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 necessario
Reviewed in Italy on March 24, 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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