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Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left
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.
303 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1998
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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...
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...
January 9, 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.
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.
February 28, 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".
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...
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".
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...
June 13, 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.
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.
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.
October 21, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.”
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.
New Left Ideas and Their Consequences
, by Sean Haylock. Crisis 01/25/16:
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 also
Thinking 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.A Very British Hatchet Job, by Clement Knox. Los Angeles Review of Books 01/18/16: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."
… 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.
May 3, 2016
In Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands, Roger Scruton offers an intellectual biography of the New Left and the Social Justice academic landscape. Though not exactly scathing, Fools offers more of a historical criticism than a critique.
If not polemic, Fools wanders perilously close to being so, without stepping over the line.
There is, in Fools, another example of how there is no middle ground any longer in the intellectual war for the hearts and minds of Western civilization. The Right is almost certainly closer to being correct in their assessment than the Left is of theirs but for the past 50 years, in the West, the Left has been the pseudo-intellectual tide that has been hard to resist -- even if it is not lifting all boats. Feeling versus Knowing seems to be the reason for this. That which 'feels' right...is often wrong. There is a difference between doing what feels right than in doing what 'is' right...and therefore doing what turns out to be good. A popular sentiment on the Left when things go badly is to brush it off saying: well, their heart was in the right place. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions and the Left is in the fast lane.
Much of the suffering, as Mr. Roger Scruton demonstrates, of Western Civilization may be attributed to them and the sentiment above.
There is no civilization in the world that has done more for the downtrodden, marginalized, and outcast than has the West. Still, all the West can do is wallow in self-loathing. For the apex of civilization this makes no sense, and almost all of this can and should be attributed to the Left.
Fools is an examination of the major 'thinkers' of the Left and how and why they've gotten it wrong.
Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands should be required reading for everyone on the Right who wishes to restore intellectual honesty to the debate and for those who wish to return sanity to Western Civilization.
A MUST READ!!!
Downside: Because Fools is an intellectual history/biography of the Left and a criticism of this it is often dry and a bit of a slog. As well, those on the Right may find they need to pause while reading it to calm down and stop wondering why those on the Left are so mind-numbingly foolish.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
If not polemic, Fools wanders perilously close to being so, without stepping over the line.
There is, in Fools, another example of how there is no middle ground any longer in the intellectual war for the hearts and minds of Western civilization. The Right is almost certainly closer to being correct in their assessment than the Left is of theirs but for the past 50 years, in the West, the Left has been the pseudo-intellectual tide that has been hard to resist -- even if it is not lifting all boats. Feeling versus Knowing seems to be the reason for this. That which 'feels' right...is often wrong. There is a difference between doing what feels right than in doing what 'is' right...and therefore doing what turns out to be good. A popular sentiment on the Left when things go badly is to brush it off saying: well, their heart was in the right place. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions and the Left is in the fast lane.
Much of the suffering, as Mr. Roger Scruton demonstrates, of Western Civilization may be attributed to them and the sentiment above.
There is no civilization in the world that has done more for the downtrodden, marginalized, and outcast than has the West. Still, all the West can do is wallow in self-loathing. For the apex of civilization this makes no sense, and almost all of this can and should be attributed to the Left.
Fools is an examination of the major 'thinkers' of the Left and how and why they've gotten it wrong.
Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands should be required reading for everyone on the Right who wishes to restore intellectual honesty to the debate and for those who wish to return sanity to Western Civilization.
A MUST READ!!!
Downside: Because Fools is an intellectual history/biography of the Left and a criticism of this it is often dry and a bit of a slog. As well, those on the Right may find they need to pause while reading it to calm down and stop wondering why those on the Left are so mind-numbingly foolish.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
August 20, 2022
عمده حرف کتاب این بود که چپ ها مهمل بسیار می بافند. و هر چه نو تر، مهمل باف تر.
December 13, 2021
I really enjoy reading Scruton. He has an impressive grasp of the historical and current philosophical viewpoints, and he is able to cut through the crap and lay out the essentials with refreshing clarity and often with an entertaining pithiness. Here he turns his attention to the philosophers of the modern Left.
I learned more about familiar writers such as Sartre, Foucault, Gramsci, Galbraith, and Dworkin. He also covers many of the Left’s lesser lights: Hobsbawm, Thompson, Habermas, Adorno, Lukács, Marcuse, Fromm, Horkheimer, Althusser, Lucan, Deleuze, Said, Raymond Williams, Perry Anderson, Badiou, and Žižek.
I should note that sometimes this book is difficult to follow and occasionally even borders on tedium. But it really isn’t Scruton’s fault. It’s the fault of the leftists that he discusses. Their thinking is almost universally nonsensical and their writings intentionally obscure, and as the book progresses they seem to just blur together into a colossal mush of toxic Marxist sludge. After trudging through the mire it becomes difficult to recall meaningful differences between their thoughts. But they all share two big ideas. First, the current system, the evil construct of the bourgeoisie, derisively labeled as “capitalism,” needs to be burned down. And second, it should be replaced with, well, we really don’t know what, but we’re sure that we self-identified non-bourgeois intellectuals should be in charge. And take our word for it, it will be a utopia. A workers’ paradise even!
Given the historical track record of these Marxist utopias, it’s hard to understand why anyone would take these ideas seriously. Indeed, this ideology has led to so much death and misery that it should be regarded as the great evil of the 20th and 21st centuries.
“It is testimony to the success of communist propaganda that it has been able to persuade so many people that fascism and communism are polar opposites and that there is a single scale of political ideology stretching from ‘far left’ to ‘far right’. Thus, while communism is on the far left, it is simply one further stage along a road that all intellectuals must go in order not to be contaminated by the true evil of our times, which is fascism.
“It is perhaps easier for an English writer than it is for an Italian to see through that nonsense, and to perceive what it is designed to conceal: the deep structural similarities between communism and fascism, both as theory and as practice, and their common antagonism to parliamentary and constitutional forms of government. Even if we except the—highly fortuitous—identification of National Socialism and Italian Fascism, to speak of either as the true political opposite of communism is the betray the most superficial understanding of the modern history. In truth there is an opposite of all the ‘isms’, and that is negotiated politics, without an ‘ism’ and without a goal other than the peaceful coexistence of rivals.”
Of course there are evils and abuses on the Populist Right as well, but the threat from the Left is far more worrisome. Not least because they already dominate nearly every area of influence in our culture — education (universities and public schools), news media (NYT, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, MSNBC...) the arts (movies, TV, literature, fine arts), soft sciences (psychology, sociology, and even increasingly and bizarrely in economics), and the monopolistic tech giants that control our internet searches, news, social media, and internet commerce.
Check out Charles’ much more informative and helpful review:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
I learned more about familiar writers such as Sartre, Foucault, Gramsci, Galbraith, and Dworkin. He also covers many of the Left’s lesser lights: Hobsbawm, Thompson, Habermas, Adorno, Lukács, Marcuse, Fromm, Horkheimer, Althusser, Lucan, Deleuze, Said, Raymond Williams, Perry Anderson, Badiou, and Žižek.
I should note that sometimes this book is difficult to follow and occasionally even borders on tedium. But it really isn’t Scruton’s fault. It’s the fault of the leftists that he discusses. Their thinking is almost universally nonsensical and their writings intentionally obscure, and as the book progresses they seem to just blur together into a colossal mush of toxic Marxist sludge. After trudging through the mire it becomes difficult to recall meaningful differences between their thoughts. But they all share two big ideas. First, the current system, the evil construct of the bourgeoisie, derisively labeled as “capitalism,” needs to be burned down. And second, it should be replaced with, well, we really don’t know what, but we’re sure that we self-identified non-bourgeois intellectuals should be in charge. And take our word for it, it will be a utopia. A workers’ paradise even!
Given the historical track record of these Marxist utopias, it’s hard to understand why anyone would take these ideas seriously. Indeed, this ideology has led to so much death and misery that it should be regarded as the great evil of the 20th and 21st centuries.
“It is testimony to the success of communist propaganda that it has been able to persuade so many people that fascism and communism are polar opposites and that there is a single scale of political ideology stretching from ‘far left’ to ‘far right’. Thus, while communism is on the far left, it is simply one further stage along a road that all intellectuals must go in order not to be contaminated by the true evil of our times, which is fascism.
“It is perhaps easier for an English writer than it is for an Italian to see through that nonsense, and to perceive what it is designed to conceal: the deep structural similarities between communism and fascism, both as theory and as practice, and their common antagonism to parliamentary and constitutional forms of government. Even if we except the—highly fortuitous—identification of National Socialism and Italian Fascism, to speak of either as the true political opposite of communism is the betray the most superficial understanding of the modern history. In truth there is an opposite of all the ‘isms’, and that is negotiated politics, without an ‘ism’ and without a goal other than the peaceful coexistence of rivals.”
Of course there are evils and abuses on the Populist Right as well, but the threat from the Left is far more worrisome. Not least because they already dominate nearly every area of influence in our culture — education (universities and public schools), news media (NYT, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, MSNBC...) the arts (movies, TV, literature, fine arts), soft sciences (psychology, sociology, and even increasingly and bizarrely in economics), and the monopolistic tech giants that control our internet searches, news, social media, and internet commerce.
Check out Charles’ much more informative and helpful review:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
February 25, 2016
This is my first book by Roger Scruton, and he is a revelation! True conservative, intelligent and analytical, with clear writing, debunks the nonsense machine of the leftist philosophers. Brilliant book!
October 19, 2018
In this book, Roger Scruton aims to deface the thinkers of the New Left as "fools, frauds and firebrands." In my view, he succeeds, with the exception of Thompson and Ronald Dworkin. For this pair, I think the terms in the title are a tad too derisive. I admit I know Dworkin better than Thompson. Even so, I think Scruton doesn't do justice to the full range of Dworkin's work. Especially his work in political philosophy where he made huge contributions to developing (luck) egalitarianism and his contribution to legal theory in the form of the completely new and intriguing "legal interpretivism", which has posed as a rival to the dominant legal positivist view, seems to me of the highest and lasting importance. There is of course an explanation for why Scruton overlooks these achievements: egalitarianism has always has been Scruton's one big blind spot. Consequently, I have yet to read from him a sustained rebuttal of a moderate brand of egalitarianism.
Lucky for Scruton, all the other philosophers he takes to task are card-carrying/closet-/neo-/cultural-marxists. I almost started to feel sorry for Scruton (and slightly annoyed) for going through so much effort in actually reading, clarifying and structuring the hogwash that many of these Thinkers (mistakingly) thought worth sharing with the world at large. The sheer nonsense that Scruton repeatedly quotes in this book, be it from Deleuze, Lukasz or even the revered Habermas (!) sufficed for me to carry his point home that the books they appear in, are better left to dust. If there is one objection I have against Scruton, it would be that he spends too much time trying to extract something sensible out of these authors and that the book is therefore too long. I think this book could have been half the size, if it wasn't for his patience with what you could only call pure, unadulterated sophistry.
To be sure, some of these thinkers, like Foucault and Sartre have written things that are more or less intelligible, reasonably structured, and contain interesting, even true observations about human life and society. And Scruton even concedes how knowledgeable and cultured people like Zizek are. But these passages shine through like a rare glimpse of sunlight. Moreover, it only goes to show that it was not for lack of ability that these thinkers decided to engage in post-modern vaguery but intellectual vanity and a lack of scientific integrity.
Lucky for Scruton, all the other philosophers he takes to task are card-carrying/closet-/neo-/cultural-marxists. I almost started to feel sorry for Scruton (and slightly annoyed) for going through so much effort in actually reading, clarifying and structuring the hogwash that many of these Thinkers (mistakingly) thought worth sharing with the world at large. The sheer nonsense that Scruton repeatedly quotes in this book, be it from Deleuze, Lukasz or even the revered Habermas (!) sufficed for me to carry his point home that the books they appear in, are better left to dust. If there is one objection I have against Scruton, it would be that he spends too much time trying to extract something sensible out of these authors and that the book is therefore too long. I think this book could have been half the size, if it wasn't for his patience with what you could only call pure, unadulterated sophistry.
To be sure, some of these thinkers, like Foucault and Sartre have written things that are more or less intelligible, reasonably structured, and contain interesting, even true observations about human life and society. And Scruton even concedes how knowledgeable and cultured people like Zizek are. But these passages shine through like a rare glimpse of sunlight. Moreover, it only goes to show that it was not for lack of ability that these thinkers decided to engage in post-modern vaguery but intellectual vanity and a lack of scientific integrity.
July 8, 2019
Well, that is over.
This book was recommended to me by a coworker, because he wanted someone to discuss it with. Unfortunately, he overestimated my abilities. I hadn't the faintest idea what Scruton was talking about most of the time.
I have only recently become interested in philosophy and you can't really understand this book unless you are moderately well read in philosophy. The book is a response to a bunch of post-modernist philosophers, and quite pointed in some areas. However, if you haven't read those philosophers then you are left with a rather one-sided bashing of them. That is not to say that the bashing is not deserved, from the excerpts that were included they should be bashed into oblivion. It's just that because it was a response it assumed a lot of things, it assumed a level of knowledge on the part of the reader that I don't have. I wouldn't recommend this book until you've read at least some of the great philosophers of the past. He name drops Aristotle, Plato, Hume, Russell, Burke, Smith, Kant, Nietzche etc., but if you haven't read them, then you don't really understand why he is referencing them. So, yeah, not a book for a dabbler.
On the other hand, from the excerpts of people like Foucault, Deirde, Hobsbawm, etc., I agree absolutely that they say a bunch of nonsense. After reading some of these excerpts I was left wondering how on earth any of these people got famous?! Their writing was just nonsensical. I found Scruton hard to follow not because he was a bad writer, or a circular reasoner, but because I lacked a certain grounding in philosophical ideas. These people, especially Lacan, just don't make sense. They keep reading things outside their field, forming a half-baked idea around it and then incorporating it into their own work in a way that it literally doesn't make sense, just as a way of making it sound more meaningful or deep. I kept drawing similarities between them and the way my crazy schizo brother writes. I can't understand how anyone can read them and walk away with a sense of anything other than 'Well, that was a complete waste of time and brain power.'
The one thing that I will say was that the last chapter was great and perfectly understandable and made me think a lot. Now, if only the whole book had been written that way.
This book was recommended to me by a coworker, because he wanted someone to discuss it with. Unfortunately, he overestimated my abilities. I hadn't the faintest idea what Scruton was talking about most of the time.
I have only recently become interested in philosophy and you can't really understand this book unless you are moderately well read in philosophy. The book is a response to a bunch of post-modernist philosophers, and quite pointed in some areas. However, if you haven't read those philosophers then you are left with a rather one-sided bashing of them. That is not to say that the bashing is not deserved, from the excerpts that were included they should be bashed into oblivion. It's just that because it was a response it assumed a lot of things, it assumed a level of knowledge on the part of the reader that I don't have. I wouldn't recommend this book until you've read at least some of the great philosophers of the past. He name drops Aristotle, Plato, Hume, Russell, Burke, Smith, Kant, Nietzche etc., but if you haven't read them, then you don't really understand why he is referencing them. So, yeah, not a book for a dabbler.
On the other hand, from the excerpts of people like Foucault, Deirde, Hobsbawm, etc., I agree absolutely that they say a bunch of nonsense. After reading some of these excerpts I was left wondering how on earth any of these people got famous?! Their writing was just nonsensical. I found Scruton hard to follow not because he was a bad writer, or a circular reasoner, but because I lacked a certain grounding in philosophical ideas. These people, especially Lacan, just don't make sense. They keep reading things outside their field, forming a half-baked idea around it and then incorporating it into their own work in a way that it literally doesn't make sense, just as a way of making it sound more meaningful or deep. I kept drawing similarities between them and the way my crazy schizo brother writes. I can't understand how anyone can read them and walk away with a sense of anything other than 'Well, that was a complete waste of time and brain power.'
The one thing that I will say was that the last chapter was great and perfectly understandable and made me think a lot. Now, if only the whole book had been written that way.
November 23, 2020
I take, and appreciate, this book's principal achievement to be its performative retort to what no one can fail to observe in the intellectual climate of the left's greenhouse: "there is no alternative."
But my opinions of the combatants -- many of whom I've cared for enough to try to read and understand -- are mostly unchanged. And so, what is the point of this book -- too polite to be a polemic, too scholarly to sing to an impatient choir and too proud to audition for any other?
It's not that Scruton is way off the mark with his criticisms (most of those can already be found in the relevant literatures) or mean-spirited (he displays some admiration and empathy throughout without falling for the take-the-high-road trap): disjointed composition and ambition hold this book back. In the third chapter Scruton counters Dworkin with a conservative theory of legal interpretation, based on Dworkin's own premises, that is interesting and valuable. In most chapters, he does a lovely job of evoking and describing the style and rhetorical devices deployed by these authors in a way that jumps through and beyond their work back to what it is actually like, as a human and a reader, to encounter books that are both totally opaque and naked -- for example, his description of Deleuze and Guattari's trilogy as "directed nonsense" neatly encapsulates what I've gotten from those books despite the best efforts of the (expert or lay) Deleuzians I've had the good fortune to hang around. In the fourth chapter, though, Scruton writes a timid, repetitive, and schematic analysis of Foucault's career -- there is little insight, little intervention, and little life.
The rest of the book proceeds accordingly: some sections educate or entertain, and some just exist.
But my opinions of the combatants -- many of whom I've cared for enough to try to read and understand -- are mostly unchanged. And so, what is the point of this book -- too polite to be a polemic, too scholarly to sing to an impatient choir and too proud to audition for any other?
It's not that Scruton is way off the mark with his criticisms (most of those can already be found in the relevant literatures) or mean-spirited (he displays some admiration and empathy throughout without falling for the take-the-high-road trap): disjointed composition and ambition hold this book back. In the third chapter Scruton counters Dworkin with a conservative theory of legal interpretation, based on Dworkin's own premises, that is interesting and valuable. In most chapters, he does a lovely job of evoking and describing the style and rhetorical devices deployed by these authors in a way that jumps through and beyond their work back to what it is actually like, as a human and a reader, to encounter books that are both totally opaque and naked -- for example, his description of Deleuze and Guattari's trilogy as "directed nonsense" neatly encapsulates what I've gotten from those books despite the best efforts of the (expert or lay) Deleuzians I've had the good fortune to hang around. In the fourth chapter, though, Scruton writes a timid, repetitive, and schematic analysis of Foucault's career -- there is little insight, little intervention, and little life.
The rest of the book proceeds accordingly: some sections educate or entertain, and some just exist.
February 5, 2017
It is easy enough to know what the Right thinks, and why. Half a dozen recent books can easily be found explaining clearly libertarianism; or social conservatism; or “reform conservatism.” But no such thing exists for the Left. Yes, there are many books on what political ends the Left desires. I think those desires are mostly insane and fly in the face of reality. But it cannot be true that those on the Left view their desires, or what drives their desires, as either insane or senseless. And one must know one’s enemy. So why are those ends desired? I have always found that hard to say.
Roger Scruton’s book explains it all. At least, it explains it with respect to the “New Left”—Western thinkers, mostly of the second half of the 20th Century, who generally take Marxism, or part of Marxism, as their starting point. He writes with rare precision, especially considering the gelatinous, incoherent nature of many of the writers he analyzes. He also has a gift for the pithy phrase, which makes the heavy reading in sections of the book (after all, Scruton is a professional philosopher) more tolerable.
What Scruton calls the New Left, or just the Left, is distinct from what I would call “traditional liberalism.” In America, traditional liberalism wore various guises, from Progressivism to postwar liberal internationalism, which collectively held sway for the first half of the Twentieth Century. (Europe, of course, was different, but had similar philosophies, such as some early social democrats.) Then, like a reverse Cronus, traditional liberalism was eaten by its progeny, the New Left. Traditional liberalism still exists alongside the New Left, but mostly in the same form as a dependent conjoined twin, both in America and Europe. Today, the New Left dominates all left-of-center thinking.
Scruton does not much discuss traditional liberalism in this book, but I think it’s important to distinguish it, since most “liberals” today would claim to be traditional liberals, when they are really creatures of the New Left, what they would term “progressives.” Traditional liberalism was distinguished by, as James Burnham analyzed it, its view of the nature of man: “liberalism believes man’s nature to be not fixed but changing, with an unlimited or at any rate indefinitely large potential for positive development.” This is in contradiction to traditional, conservative views of the imperfection and imperfectability of man—and of society. But it does not imply the conclusions of the New Left, as we will see. Most importantly, the New Left rejects this incremental perfectibility, exchanging it for a doctrine of phase change, like water to ice, where utopia arises spontaneously and in an instant through the correct application of abstract principles cooked up in the writings of intellectuals.
Naturally enough, Scruton begins with the key definition: “What Is Left”? Scruton characterizes all who are of the “Left” as sharing an “enduring outlook on the world,” going back to the Enlightenment. The key common characteristic of that outlook is the belief “that the goods of this world are unjustly distributed, and that the fault lies not in human nature but in usurpations practised by a dominant class.” Therefore, those of the Left “define themselves in opposition to established power, [and see themselves as] the champions of the new order that will rectify the ancient grievance of the oppressed.”
From this, Scruton moves to specificity. Thus, “Two attributes of the new order justify the pursuit of it: liberation and ‘social justice.’” To the Left, liberation means not the freedom to be left alone but atomism—freedom from nearly any constraint, and in particular from the constraints that constitute “the shared system of norms and values at the heart of Western society.” The only constraints to be left are the ever mounting constraints on any person who would defend or maintain those norms and values; those are to be crushed by increasingly brutal laws and social action directed only at them. And to the Left, “social justice” means equality of ends, not equality of opportunity, to be obtained “by a comprehensive rearrangement of society, so that the privileges, hierarchies, and even the unequal distribution of goods are either overcome or challenged. . . . . [T]he most important point to notice is that it is an argument that allows nothing to stand in its way. . . . In this way ‘social justice’ becomes a barely concealed demand for the ‘clean sweep’ of history that revolutionaries have always attempted.”
Scruton notes that these two goals are in tension, since total liberation implies the freedom to choose activity that can then result in increasing inequality, due to variances in talent and luck. But that conflict is always obscured by the Left, simply “by declaring war on traditional hierarchies and institutions in the name of its two ideals. . . . Moreover, ‘social justice’ is a goal so overwhelmingly important, so unquestionably superior to the established interests that stand against it, as to purify every action done in its name.”
Moving from specificity of belief to practice, Scruton notes several impulses of the Left, each of which drives practice. One impulse is utopianism, a declared goal to reach a prize of inestimable value, a totally new and perfect society, but which always recedes and has only the vaguest, self-contradictory contours. Utopianism tends to make the Left view even horrific costs as nothing compared to the benefits of the coming utopia, and also tends to drive power to the most extreme members of any particular Left group (in contrast to conservatives, who being anti-Utopian tend to be skeptical of extremists). A second impulse is to corrupt language and turn it into a tool not to describe reality, but a tool for the “rival purpose of asserting power over it.” The purpose of language in the mouths of the Left is “to protect ideology from the malicious attacks of real things.” Of course, “Human individuals are the most important of these real things, the obstacles that all revolutionary systems must overcome, and which all ideologies must destroy.” Dealing with individuals as individuals necessarily requires a person to view another as he sees himself, to a greater or lesser degree, and therefore undercuts ideology, because “real social discourse is part of day-to-day problem solving and the minute search for agreement,” goals in contradiction to the sweeping goals of the Left. By corrupting language, the Left alleviates this problem. A third impulse is to believe in constant motion toward a pre-ordained ideological goal, sweeping us (and especially individuals, regardless of their personal choices) toward that goal, in which all change is “irreversible” but constant “struggle” is a constant necessity. Finally, all these impulses, and the actions they drive, are in the service, ultimately, of the goal of negation of what IS now, in the spirit of Goethe’s Mephistopheles: “Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint”—I am the spirit that always denies, or negates.
Having laid a basic groundwork, Scruton begins with his first two thinkers: Eric Hobsbawn and E.P. Thompson, both of whom he clearly admires for their intellect. Choosing these men also means Scruton begins with the thinkers who are closest to the mainstream in their works, in that their works are comprehensible to, and comprehended by, the average reader—and, in fact are designed to be read primarily by the mainstream reader, not specialist acolytes.
Hobsbawn and Thompson were unapologetic Communist historians who viewed history through that lens, and, who, like Procrustes, lopped history to fit Communism. Hobsbawn came of age, and are emblematic of the time, when Communism exercised a religious grip on much of Britain’s educated youth, causing them to repudiate and negate their nation and its institutions. By all accounts, Hobsbawn was a giant of a historian, with enormous erudition and writing ability—all put to the service of his ideology. Scruton even-handedly examines the theories of history put forth by Hobsbawn, and finds them wanting, though not bizarre, more simply incomplete and not in tune with reality, because blinkered by the need to constantly explain away inconvenient mismatches between Marxist theory and reality (such as wages continuously rising under the free market, or the existence of the common law). Similarly, Thompson attempted to address by, as Scruton says, “sleight of hand,” the utter failure of the English working class to properly view itself as Marx viewed the working class, as a class acting as an agent, but that rather viewed themselves as people bound together primarily by things other than class. At its core, of course, Marxism is a theory of antagonism to all existing institutions, and Hobsbawn’s, and to a lesser extent Thompson’s, open goal was to advance the destruction of those institutions. Scruton ends by comparing Hobsbawn to the Holocaust denier David Irving, and concluding that both of them should be treated the same. And his ultimate verdict on both is that they could not escape the box into which their devotion to orthodox Marxism put them.
Scruton next turns to America, noting first that “American leftism has more often than not taken the form of legal and constitutional argument, interspersed with reflections on justice that are mercifully free from the class resentments that speak in the works of the European left.” Here, therefore, he profiles John Kenneth Galbraith and Ronald Dworkin, lesser lights than Hobsbawn. Marxism, of course, never got traction in America—class struggle does not resonate when everyone, high and low, is climbing the greasy pole. (Ironically, in today’s America, class struggle resonates more, as those deemed deplorable by the ruling classes see increasing obstacles to their ability to climb.) Galbraith was an economist, who used social psychology, not analysis, statistics or comparisons of different forms of businesses, to reach his economic conclusions. His particular focus was how “man, in his fallen condition, is subject to the tyranny of appetite, because his appetites are not truly his, but imposed on him, magicked into him, by others, and notably by the idols and fetishes of the marketplace.” He was a lightweight intellectual and a toady to the powerful, not a contributor to real thinking, and to the extent he had any thinking, it bought into the Marxist concept of the “system,” the collection of institutions making up society, as something retrograde and in need of revolutionary change, by people, like, no surprise, John Kenneth Galbraith.
Dworkin fares even worse; Scruton savages him unmercifully. This is an area, law, about which I know much more than philosophy generally, and I can certainly second Scruton’s view of Dworkin as an unbearable hack. Like John Rawls (not discussed by Scruton, though mentioned in passing), Dworkin’s only intellectual project was finding high-sounding but sophistical arguments, falsely appearing to be based in American principles of justice, that justified the imposition by judges of sweeping left-wing rulings designed to negate, without appeal, any traditional American value. For Dworkin, a left-wing “political morality” (the only kind that can exist) trumps anything else. Groups, not individuals, have rights; but they only have rights if what they desire serves the goals of the Left—this is Dworkin’s “moral theory” of the Constitution, phrased largely as the right to be treated as an equal, meaning not equal treatment, nor even equality of result, but treatment calculated to achieve a Left policy outcome.
Here Scruton starts to emphasize a characteristic that connects all thinkers in this book: a total unwillingness to engage their opponents on the Right, other than with the language of ritual incantation and denunciation. And Scruton also begins to note a second problem—the increasing tendency as he goes through his book for the thinkers he profiles to be very difficult to understand, since they write in what is, or at least seems like, a deliberately obscurantist way. In Dworkin’s case, that’s because his arguments are, like Hobsbawn and Thompson, constructed to fit the precise conclusion already determined, but that servitude must be obscured. In the case of other writers, it’s because they are literally senseless.
We start down the path of those writers, who are all Continental writers, with Sartre and Foucault. It is at this point that I began to find Scruton’s book less immediately valuable to me, in part because while the various writers from this point on are highly influential and have followings among the global cultural elite, none of them really make any sense or have any impact on reality, and to the extent they make any sense, they are highly philosophical, and therefore abstract.
Scruton sets the early- to mid-20th Century French stage, discussing various writers, from Jacques Maritain to Charles Maurras, and, of course, the impact of the wars on the French intellectual class. Scruton ascribes much of the basis of the French New Left to Alexandre Kojève, a Russian émigré whose seminars on Hegel were hugely influential. His focus was on Hegel’s focus on the “self-created individual.” “But what impressed Kojève’s audience of spiritually hungry atheists in the 1930s was the vision of radical freedom and the self-created individual. It dawned on them that, by exploring the self and its freedom, it was possible to re-enchant their disenchanted world, and to place the human subject once again at the centre of things.” From here there was much discussion of the Hegelian dialectic, and of Subject and Other.
Scruton thinks Sartre worthy of some interest, though silly for following individualism to the conclusion that what the individual must commit himself to is revolution in the cause of social justice. Why, exactly, asks Scruton? There is no answer—other than the spirit of Mephistopheles, once again, in the service of a vague utopia (in Scruton’s words, “a noumenal promise, a ghostly beckoning from the Kingdom of Ends.”) And it is in Sartre that we first encounter the New Left incantory word “totalization.” “Like many words with a liturgical use it is not defined but merely repeated—and applied with such mesmerizing meaninglessness as to attract a phalanx of admirers prepared to serve as a priesthood of the faith.” Scruton spends some time chasing Sartre’s thought, and notes that he added to the basic leftist desire for Utopia, an additional “belief that all ideals and loyalties are merely invitations to betrayal, and that redemption lies within the individual, to be bestowed on himself by himself alone.” I note that such a belief means that all who adhere to it are rootless, and as Robert Nisbet said, “rootless men always betray.” Scruton is somewhat kinder to Foucault, whose focus was the structures of power, but who was not as personally committed to the Left project, and therefore was a more independent thinker.
Next Scruton treats Germany, or, as he titles the chapter, “Tedium in Germany: Downhill to Habermas.” Here he deals largely with the Frankfurt School, beginning with György Lukács (Hungarian, of course, not German—and Scruton notes that it’s in part because of the seething resentment against Lukács and his ilk, even today, that Hungary is currently dominated by the conservative Fidesz party). Lukács pushed “Marxist humanism”—in essence, an attempt to update orthodox Marxism, given the total failure of its theories to comport with reality. He talked much about “reification,” the supposed mechanism by which apparently normal social relations are in fact a sign of alienation and commodification, requiring a totalizing approach, led by the Communist Party, to unleash the class consciousness thereby suppressed. Most importantly, this means what actual working class members think is irrelevant; all that matters is the Party.
Scruton then goes through Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, and other luminaries of the Frankfurt School. He notes some insights—but nothing that could not already be found in Arnold and Ruskin, and in the Old Testament, as critiques of modern society. He ends with an extensive discussion of Jürgen Habermas (bizarrely, still alive), today not as revolutionary, but as defender of the EU “soft-left bureaucracy” and desirous, as the German left establishment in general, of maintaining its “status as a privileged elite.” “The dialogues that Habermas now advocates . . . are noticeable for the voices they exclude: no nationalists, no social conservatives, no pre-modernists or fervent free-marketeers will be invited to the table, when the postmodern future of mankind is plotted in the Habermasian bunker.”
Two of the three remaining chapters deal with nonsense philosophers: Althusser, Lacan, Deleuze, Badiou, Žižek. I had not heard of a single one of these. As with all the other thinkers he covers, Scruton goes into considerable detail about their thought. But Scruton, by his own admission, struggles in these two chapters, because most of their writing is incomprehensible, and apparently deliberately so—and what little can be understood is nonsensical. This is because “Refutation must be evaded, so that the truth within the dogma can be protected from malice contained in real things. Hence . . . [they] engage with nothing written by those outside the Marxist camp, nor do they acknowledge any tradition of social and political thinking that does not bear, from its inception, the stamp of the Marxist dogma toward which it tends.” But Scruton tries. And fails—as he says after quoting one passage of Althusser, it “illustrates the ponderous, suspicion-laden circularity of Althusser’s prose, which goes round and round monotonously on its own heels, like a lunatic trapped in an imaginary cage.” Lacan and Deleuze introduce bogus use of semiotic and mathematical tools, ripped from their actual use and babbled about in irrelevant contexts, used as charms. The result is the creation of a “nonsense machine,” useful mainly for dullard academics “to bury their intellectual faults while revealing their political sympathies,” which are totalitarian Left. Truth is formally irrelevant, “mere representation.” “The boiling tide of nonsense flows between secure walls on which indelible messages have been chiseled. These tell us that the world is in the hands of the capitalist Other, and is awaiting the great Event of its liberation—the revolution that is to be summoned by the new literature of spells.”
[Review continues as first comment.]
Roger Scruton’s book explains it all. At least, it explains it with respect to the “New Left”—Western thinkers, mostly of the second half of the 20th Century, who generally take Marxism, or part of Marxism, as their starting point. He writes with rare precision, especially considering the gelatinous, incoherent nature of many of the writers he analyzes. He also has a gift for the pithy phrase, which makes the heavy reading in sections of the book (after all, Scruton is a professional philosopher) more tolerable.
What Scruton calls the New Left, or just the Left, is distinct from what I would call “traditional liberalism.” In America, traditional liberalism wore various guises, from Progressivism to postwar liberal internationalism, which collectively held sway for the first half of the Twentieth Century. (Europe, of course, was different, but had similar philosophies, such as some early social democrats.) Then, like a reverse Cronus, traditional liberalism was eaten by its progeny, the New Left. Traditional liberalism still exists alongside the New Left, but mostly in the same form as a dependent conjoined twin, both in America and Europe. Today, the New Left dominates all left-of-center thinking.
Scruton does not much discuss traditional liberalism in this book, but I think it’s important to distinguish it, since most “liberals” today would claim to be traditional liberals, when they are really creatures of the New Left, what they would term “progressives.” Traditional liberalism was distinguished by, as James Burnham analyzed it, its view of the nature of man: “liberalism believes man’s nature to be not fixed but changing, with an unlimited or at any rate indefinitely large potential for positive development.” This is in contradiction to traditional, conservative views of the imperfection and imperfectability of man—and of society. But it does not imply the conclusions of the New Left, as we will see. Most importantly, the New Left rejects this incremental perfectibility, exchanging it for a doctrine of phase change, like water to ice, where utopia arises spontaneously and in an instant through the correct application of abstract principles cooked up in the writings of intellectuals.
Naturally enough, Scruton begins with the key definition: “What Is Left”? Scruton characterizes all who are of the “Left” as sharing an “enduring outlook on the world,” going back to the Enlightenment. The key common characteristic of that outlook is the belief “that the goods of this world are unjustly distributed, and that the fault lies not in human nature but in usurpations practised by a dominant class.” Therefore, those of the Left “define themselves in opposition to established power, [and see themselves as] the champions of the new order that will rectify the ancient grievance of the oppressed.”
From this, Scruton moves to specificity. Thus, “Two attributes of the new order justify the pursuit of it: liberation and ‘social justice.’” To the Left, liberation means not the freedom to be left alone but atomism—freedom from nearly any constraint, and in particular from the constraints that constitute “the shared system of norms and values at the heart of Western society.” The only constraints to be left are the ever mounting constraints on any person who would defend or maintain those norms and values; those are to be crushed by increasingly brutal laws and social action directed only at them. And to the Left, “social justice” means equality of ends, not equality of opportunity, to be obtained “by a comprehensive rearrangement of society, so that the privileges, hierarchies, and even the unequal distribution of goods are either overcome or challenged. . . . . [T]he most important point to notice is that it is an argument that allows nothing to stand in its way. . . . In this way ‘social justice’ becomes a barely concealed demand for the ‘clean sweep’ of history that revolutionaries have always attempted.”
Scruton notes that these two goals are in tension, since total liberation implies the freedom to choose activity that can then result in increasing inequality, due to variances in talent and luck. But that conflict is always obscured by the Left, simply “by declaring war on traditional hierarchies and institutions in the name of its two ideals. . . . Moreover, ‘social justice’ is a goal so overwhelmingly important, so unquestionably superior to the established interests that stand against it, as to purify every action done in its name.”
Moving from specificity of belief to practice, Scruton notes several impulses of the Left, each of which drives practice. One impulse is utopianism, a declared goal to reach a prize of inestimable value, a totally new and perfect society, but which always recedes and has only the vaguest, self-contradictory contours. Utopianism tends to make the Left view even horrific costs as nothing compared to the benefits of the coming utopia, and also tends to drive power to the most extreme members of any particular Left group (in contrast to conservatives, who being anti-Utopian tend to be skeptical of extremists). A second impulse is to corrupt language and turn it into a tool not to describe reality, but a tool for the “rival purpose of asserting power over it.” The purpose of language in the mouths of the Left is “to protect ideology from the malicious attacks of real things.” Of course, “Human individuals are the most important of these real things, the obstacles that all revolutionary systems must overcome, and which all ideologies must destroy.” Dealing with individuals as individuals necessarily requires a person to view another as he sees himself, to a greater or lesser degree, and therefore undercuts ideology, because “real social discourse is part of day-to-day problem solving and the minute search for agreement,” goals in contradiction to the sweeping goals of the Left. By corrupting language, the Left alleviates this problem. A third impulse is to believe in constant motion toward a pre-ordained ideological goal, sweeping us (and especially individuals, regardless of their personal choices) toward that goal, in which all change is “irreversible” but constant “struggle” is a constant necessity. Finally, all these impulses, and the actions they drive, are in the service, ultimately, of the goal of negation of what IS now, in the spirit of Goethe’s Mephistopheles: “Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint”—I am the spirit that always denies, or negates.
Having laid a basic groundwork, Scruton begins with his first two thinkers: Eric Hobsbawn and E.P. Thompson, both of whom he clearly admires for their intellect. Choosing these men also means Scruton begins with the thinkers who are closest to the mainstream in their works, in that their works are comprehensible to, and comprehended by, the average reader—and, in fact are designed to be read primarily by the mainstream reader, not specialist acolytes.
Hobsbawn and Thompson were unapologetic Communist historians who viewed history through that lens, and, who, like Procrustes, lopped history to fit Communism. Hobsbawn came of age, and are emblematic of the time, when Communism exercised a religious grip on much of Britain’s educated youth, causing them to repudiate and negate their nation and its institutions. By all accounts, Hobsbawn was a giant of a historian, with enormous erudition and writing ability—all put to the service of his ideology. Scruton even-handedly examines the theories of history put forth by Hobsbawn, and finds them wanting, though not bizarre, more simply incomplete and not in tune with reality, because blinkered by the need to constantly explain away inconvenient mismatches between Marxist theory and reality (such as wages continuously rising under the free market, or the existence of the common law). Similarly, Thompson attempted to address by, as Scruton says, “sleight of hand,” the utter failure of the English working class to properly view itself as Marx viewed the working class, as a class acting as an agent, but that rather viewed themselves as people bound together primarily by things other than class. At its core, of course, Marxism is a theory of antagonism to all existing institutions, and Hobsbawn’s, and to a lesser extent Thompson’s, open goal was to advance the destruction of those institutions. Scruton ends by comparing Hobsbawn to the Holocaust denier David Irving, and concluding that both of them should be treated the same. And his ultimate verdict on both is that they could not escape the box into which their devotion to orthodox Marxism put them.
Scruton next turns to America, noting first that “American leftism has more often than not taken the form of legal and constitutional argument, interspersed with reflections on justice that are mercifully free from the class resentments that speak in the works of the European left.” Here, therefore, he profiles John Kenneth Galbraith and Ronald Dworkin, lesser lights than Hobsbawn. Marxism, of course, never got traction in America—class struggle does not resonate when everyone, high and low, is climbing the greasy pole. (Ironically, in today’s America, class struggle resonates more, as those deemed deplorable by the ruling classes see increasing obstacles to their ability to climb.) Galbraith was an economist, who used social psychology, not analysis, statistics or comparisons of different forms of businesses, to reach his economic conclusions. His particular focus was how “man, in his fallen condition, is subject to the tyranny of appetite, because his appetites are not truly his, but imposed on him, magicked into him, by others, and notably by the idols and fetishes of the marketplace.” He was a lightweight intellectual and a toady to the powerful, not a contributor to real thinking, and to the extent he had any thinking, it bought into the Marxist concept of the “system,” the collection of institutions making up society, as something retrograde and in need of revolutionary change, by people, like, no surprise, John Kenneth Galbraith.
Dworkin fares even worse; Scruton savages him unmercifully. This is an area, law, about which I know much more than philosophy generally, and I can certainly second Scruton’s view of Dworkin as an unbearable hack. Like John Rawls (not discussed by Scruton, though mentioned in passing), Dworkin’s only intellectual project was finding high-sounding but sophistical arguments, falsely appearing to be based in American principles of justice, that justified the imposition by judges of sweeping left-wing rulings designed to negate, without appeal, any traditional American value. For Dworkin, a left-wing “political morality” (the only kind that can exist) trumps anything else. Groups, not individuals, have rights; but they only have rights if what they desire serves the goals of the Left—this is Dworkin’s “moral theory” of the Constitution, phrased largely as the right to be treated as an equal, meaning not equal treatment, nor even equality of result, but treatment calculated to achieve a Left policy outcome.
Here Scruton starts to emphasize a characteristic that connects all thinkers in this book: a total unwillingness to engage their opponents on the Right, other than with the language of ritual incantation and denunciation. And Scruton also begins to note a second problem—the increasing tendency as he goes through his book for the thinkers he profiles to be very difficult to understand, since they write in what is, or at least seems like, a deliberately obscurantist way. In Dworkin’s case, that’s because his arguments are, like Hobsbawn and Thompson, constructed to fit the precise conclusion already determined, but that servitude must be obscured. In the case of other writers, it’s because they are literally senseless.
We start down the path of those writers, who are all Continental writers, with Sartre and Foucault. It is at this point that I began to find Scruton’s book less immediately valuable to me, in part because while the various writers from this point on are highly influential and have followings among the global cultural elite, none of them really make any sense or have any impact on reality, and to the extent they make any sense, they are highly philosophical, and therefore abstract.
Scruton sets the early- to mid-20th Century French stage, discussing various writers, from Jacques Maritain to Charles Maurras, and, of course, the impact of the wars on the French intellectual class. Scruton ascribes much of the basis of the French New Left to Alexandre Kojève, a Russian émigré whose seminars on Hegel were hugely influential. His focus was on Hegel’s focus on the “self-created individual.” “But what impressed Kojève’s audience of spiritually hungry atheists in the 1930s was the vision of radical freedom and the self-created individual. It dawned on them that, by exploring the self and its freedom, it was possible to re-enchant their disenchanted world, and to place the human subject once again at the centre of things.” From here there was much discussion of the Hegelian dialectic, and of Subject and Other.
Scruton thinks Sartre worthy of some interest, though silly for following individualism to the conclusion that what the individual must commit himself to is revolution in the cause of social justice. Why, exactly, asks Scruton? There is no answer—other than the spirit of Mephistopheles, once again, in the service of a vague utopia (in Scruton’s words, “a noumenal promise, a ghostly beckoning from the Kingdom of Ends.”) And it is in Sartre that we first encounter the New Left incantory word “totalization.” “Like many words with a liturgical use it is not defined but merely repeated—and applied with such mesmerizing meaninglessness as to attract a phalanx of admirers prepared to serve as a priesthood of the faith.” Scruton spends some time chasing Sartre’s thought, and notes that he added to the basic leftist desire for Utopia, an additional “belief that all ideals and loyalties are merely invitations to betrayal, and that redemption lies within the individual, to be bestowed on himself by himself alone.” I note that such a belief means that all who adhere to it are rootless, and as Robert Nisbet said, “rootless men always betray.” Scruton is somewhat kinder to Foucault, whose focus was the structures of power, but who was not as personally committed to the Left project, and therefore was a more independent thinker.
Next Scruton treats Germany, or, as he titles the chapter, “Tedium in Germany: Downhill to Habermas.” Here he deals largely with the Frankfurt School, beginning with György Lukács (Hungarian, of course, not German—and Scruton notes that it’s in part because of the seething resentment against Lukács and his ilk, even today, that Hungary is currently dominated by the conservative Fidesz party). Lukács pushed “Marxist humanism”—in essence, an attempt to update orthodox Marxism, given the total failure of its theories to comport with reality. He talked much about “reification,” the supposed mechanism by which apparently normal social relations are in fact a sign of alienation and commodification, requiring a totalizing approach, led by the Communist Party, to unleash the class consciousness thereby suppressed. Most importantly, this means what actual working class members think is irrelevant; all that matters is the Party.
Scruton then goes through Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, and other luminaries of the Frankfurt School. He notes some insights—but nothing that could not already be found in Arnold and Ruskin, and in the Old Testament, as critiques of modern society. He ends with an extensive discussion of Jürgen Habermas (bizarrely, still alive), today not as revolutionary, but as defender of the EU “soft-left bureaucracy” and desirous, as the German left establishment in general, of maintaining its “status as a privileged elite.” “The dialogues that Habermas now advocates . . . are noticeable for the voices they exclude: no nationalists, no social conservatives, no pre-modernists or fervent free-marketeers will be invited to the table, when the postmodern future of mankind is plotted in the Habermasian bunker.”
Two of the three remaining chapters deal with nonsense philosophers: Althusser, Lacan, Deleuze, Badiou, Žižek. I had not heard of a single one of these. As with all the other thinkers he covers, Scruton goes into considerable detail about their thought. But Scruton, by his own admission, struggles in these two chapters, because most of their writing is incomprehensible, and apparently deliberately so—and what little can be understood is nonsensical. This is because “Refutation must be evaded, so that the truth within the dogma can be protected from malice contained in real things. Hence . . . [they] engage with nothing written by those outside the Marxist camp, nor do they acknowledge any tradition of social and political thinking that does not bear, from its inception, the stamp of the Marxist dogma toward which it tends.” But Scruton tries. And fails—as he says after quoting one passage of Althusser, it “illustrates the ponderous, suspicion-laden circularity of Althusser’s prose, which goes round and round monotonously on its own heels, like a lunatic trapped in an imaginary cage.” Lacan and Deleuze introduce bogus use of semiotic and mathematical tools, ripped from their actual use and babbled about in irrelevant contexts, used as charms. The result is the creation of a “nonsense machine,” useful mainly for dullard academics “to bury their intellectual faults while revealing their political sympathies,” which are totalitarian Left. Truth is formally irrelevant, “mere representation.” “The boiling tide of nonsense flows between secure walls on which indelible messages have been chiseled. These tell us that the world is in the hands of the capitalist Other, and is awaiting the great Event of its liberation—the revolution that is to be summoned by the new literature of spells.”
[Review continues as first comment.]
Read
May 9, 2016"Late in his book Scruton comments that he has searched these thinkers’ writings “in vain for a description of how the ‘equality of being’ advocated in their fraught manifestoes is to be achieved.” In the end, he says, “We know nothing of the socialist future, save only that is it both necessary and desirable.” But for that reason the socialist faith is a blind faith. Scruton knows perfectly well what he thinks is worth building—or, more to the point, conserving—and in his final chapter, titled “What is Right?”, he gives as clearly concise a summation of his own political position as one could ask for. It is only 15 pages long, but it is by itself worth the price of admission to this book."
Alan Jacobs's review: http://www.theamericanconservative.co...
Alan Jacobs's review: http://www.theamericanconservative.co...
October 28, 2019
Following the shameful sacking of Sir Roger Scruton as Government's Housing advisor (for things he never said) I became determined to read this book, which shows the power of ideas, the more our permissive yet simulatneously cencorious society marginalises those outside the liberal metropolitan bubble, the more intriguing those ideas become. In this book he sets to deconstruct a narrative set by the 'deconstructionists'. It is a kind of intellectual revenge if not a scholarly reply to the kind of thinking which inspired the student riots in 1968 Paris which he witnessed and became a Conservative as a result of it and the kind of So-called intellectuals who drove him out academia for the crime of being a Conservative.
This book is generally a very difficult read if not totally impenetrable. But the blame cannot be laid on the author himself but on the left wing authors which he effectively reviews. Scruton's own style is erudite yet entertaining and understandable and even he himself calls out the authors quoted in the book for their meaningless bureaucratic dither and their 'nonsense machine'. He begins by debunking Marxian Historical Materialism explored by left-wing historians such as EP Thompson and their deliberate attempt to view history through the lens of class association and class struggle and Eric Hobsbawm and György Lukács' shameless blind-eye if not justification for Uncle Joe's oppression in the Soviet Union in the name of the emancipation of the proletariat. In his view, Marxian historiography is nothing but a conscious effort to demonise the 'ruling class' and to romanticise the working class; a narrative which places 'Class' on top of the agenda. He is very hesitant to use terms like Capitalism or to describe economies as 'capitalist' but instead prefers to classify them as 'free economies' and goes on to define them as 'one where the order is spontaneous not planned and where the unequal distribution of assets arises by an invisible hand'.
Scruton patiently explains why the two goals of the French Revolution, Liberté and Egalité, are essentially incompatible. "If liberty means the liberation of the individual potential, how do we stop the ambitious, the energetic, the intelligent, the good looking and the strong from getting ahead and what should we allow ourselves by the way of constraining them?". He mentions how some on the left see literature as either politicised and specifically 'socialist or fit for flames'. He also dismisses JK Galbraith's work on economics as nothing more than psychological observations and assumptions about human behaviour dressed up in economic terms to grant it scientific respectability, but also praises him as a 'witty commentator'. Scruton is very dismissive of Dworkin's dominance in interpreting the rights afforded in the US Constitution to the individual (though not to the unborn after Roe v. Wade) and his unflinching advocacy for positive discrimination or as he sees it 'treatment as an equal rather than equal treatment'. Dworkin in Scruton's view has eroded people of their individuality and instead sees them as mere members of a sectional interest group, some of whom in Scruton's words 'burdened with an immovable handicap, notably the white males'.
He briefly mentions the Frankfurt School and how Post Modernist thinkers began to attack, challenge and deconstruct well-established ideas and beliefs which people for years held to be true. They fearlessly attacked the leading narrative and questioned the nature of truth and dismissed objectivity as 'bourgeois ideology'. This is quite interesting since the liberal left assumes that it was the populist right and Donald Trump who attacked objectivity and that 'post-truth' is a new phenomena, not knowing that that ship began sailing many years ago. Foucault is also slammed for seeing the world through the prism of power. Scruton also touches on how revolutionaries establish a monopoly over language, to formulate a kind of newspeak which gives them the high ground 'previously occupied by the truth'. This observation automatically reminds the reader of political correctness and the ongoing (if not completed) cultural revolution within the modern academia to which Scruton himself has fallen a victim. The chapters on Lacanian psychoanalysis are extremely difficult to follow and Gramsci's theory of Hegemony is only semi-intelligible. It does begin to become interesting near the end of the book where he briefly touches on the contribution of the Islamic civilisation and criticises Said for showing no regard for Western Enlightenment values. The paragraph at the penultimate chapter on Khrushchev's contradictory character is also quite interesting, about how he made himself a friend of the intellectual by denouncing Stalin and then to be turned into the enemy of the intellectual for denouncing artistic modernity. It must also be noted that Trotsky's view of the British ruling elite (he thought that the British elite thinks in terms of centuries and continents) provides a very delicious Irony in the age of Brexit and the Tory Party's tactical Short-termism. Sir Roger writes as though he is in awe of Zizek's breadth of writings and his publishing rate of 2 or 3 books a year, notwithstanding the fact that he himself has written on many fields and publishes at a faster rate than his readers can read.
Overall, Scruton's defence of the Right against the Left is not motivated by the love of money, wealth creation and commodification of everything as today's Post Thatcher Neoliberal Right views the world. But a kind of Conservativism which is more concerned about preserving the worthwhile and beautiful elements of our civilisation like beauty itself in the arts and architecture instead of the modernist monstrosities, an active and free civic society (agaisnt the potential abritary powers of big government and big business), the family, some belief in transcendence, order, virtue and truth, all of which came under attack by the New Left. He believes that the onus of proof should be placed upon those who want to deconstruct the established order and replace one elite with another, rather than those who see and appreciate the necessity of certain concepts and practices and the potential dangers of a radical alternative.
This book is generally a very difficult read if not totally impenetrable. But the blame cannot be laid on the author himself but on the left wing authors which he effectively reviews. Scruton's own style is erudite yet entertaining and understandable and even he himself calls out the authors quoted in the book for their meaningless bureaucratic dither and their 'nonsense machine'. He begins by debunking Marxian Historical Materialism explored by left-wing historians such as EP Thompson and their deliberate attempt to view history through the lens of class association and class struggle and Eric Hobsbawm and György Lukács' shameless blind-eye if not justification for Uncle Joe's oppression in the Soviet Union in the name of the emancipation of the proletariat. In his view, Marxian historiography is nothing but a conscious effort to demonise the 'ruling class' and to romanticise the working class; a narrative which places 'Class' on top of the agenda. He is very hesitant to use terms like Capitalism or to describe economies as 'capitalist' but instead prefers to classify them as 'free economies' and goes on to define them as 'one where the order is spontaneous not planned and where the unequal distribution of assets arises by an invisible hand'.
Scruton patiently explains why the two goals of the French Revolution, Liberté and Egalité, are essentially incompatible. "If liberty means the liberation of the individual potential, how do we stop the ambitious, the energetic, the intelligent, the good looking and the strong from getting ahead and what should we allow ourselves by the way of constraining them?". He mentions how some on the left see literature as either politicised and specifically 'socialist or fit for flames'. He also dismisses JK Galbraith's work on economics as nothing more than psychological observations and assumptions about human behaviour dressed up in economic terms to grant it scientific respectability, but also praises him as a 'witty commentator'. Scruton is very dismissive of Dworkin's dominance in interpreting the rights afforded in the US Constitution to the individual (though not to the unborn after Roe v. Wade) and his unflinching advocacy for positive discrimination or as he sees it 'treatment as an equal rather than equal treatment'. Dworkin in Scruton's view has eroded people of their individuality and instead sees them as mere members of a sectional interest group, some of whom in Scruton's words 'burdened with an immovable handicap, notably the white males'.
He briefly mentions the Frankfurt School and how Post Modernist thinkers began to attack, challenge and deconstruct well-established ideas and beliefs which people for years held to be true. They fearlessly attacked the leading narrative and questioned the nature of truth and dismissed objectivity as 'bourgeois ideology'. This is quite interesting since the liberal left assumes that it was the populist right and Donald Trump who attacked objectivity and that 'post-truth' is a new phenomena, not knowing that that ship began sailing many years ago. Foucault is also slammed for seeing the world through the prism of power. Scruton also touches on how revolutionaries establish a monopoly over language, to formulate a kind of newspeak which gives them the high ground 'previously occupied by the truth'. This observation automatically reminds the reader of political correctness and the ongoing (if not completed) cultural revolution within the modern academia to which Scruton himself has fallen a victim. The chapters on Lacanian psychoanalysis are extremely difficult to follow and Gramsci's theory of Hegemony is only semi-intelligible. It does begin to become interesting near the end of the book where he briefly touches on the contribution of the Islamic civilisation and criticises Said for showing no regard for Western Enlightenment values. The paragraph at the penultimate chapter on Khrushchev's contradictory character is also quite interesting, about how he made himself a friend of the intellectual by denouncing Stalin and then to be turned into the enemy of the intellectual for denouncing artistic modernity. It must also be noted that Trotsky's view of the British ruling elite (he thought that the British elite thinks in terms of centuries and continents) provides a very delicious Irony in the age of Brexit and the Tory Party's tactical Short-termism. Sir Roger writes as though he is in awe of Zizek's breadth of writings and his publishing rate of 2 or 3 books a year, notwithstanding the fact that he himself has written on many fields and publishes at a faster rate than his readers can read.
Overall, Scruton's defence of the Right against the Left is not motivated by the love of money, wealth creation and commodification of everything as today's Post Thatcher Neoliberal Right views the world. But a kind of Conservativism which is more concerned about preserving the worthwhile and beautiful elements of our civilisation like beauty itself in the arts and architecture instead of the modernist monstrosities, an active and free civic society (agaisnt the potential abritary powers of big government and big business), the family, some belief in transcendence, order, virtue and truth, all of which came under attack by the New Left. He believes that the onus of proof should be placed upon those who want to deconstruct the established order and replace one elite with another, rather than those who see and appreciate the necessity of certain concepts and practices and the potential dangers of a radical alternative.
October 8, 2020
This book as the title states gives us a look at the thinkers of the new left. The main title implies that Roger Scruton, not only disagrees with these thinkers, but didn’t think very highly about them either. After the introduction he starts out by explaining his view on what the left and at the end his views on the right are. In between he takes on a world tour focusing in on particular thinkers. Most are very postmodernist.
The following comments are based on specific pieces from the book. Pages are in brackets [], using Kindle pagination.
[77] “In an extraordinary combination of philosophical argument, psychological observation and lyrical evocation, Sartre sets out to describe the ordeal and the task of consciousness, in a world that has no meaning other than the meaning that I, through my freedom, can impress on it.” I have no problem with this, except I don’t think of it as an ordeal, more like an adventure. Also, meaning is often a collective enterprise, where most meaning is derive from a collective effort.
[77] “Man must make his own essence, and even his existence is, in a sense, an achievement: he exists fully only when he is what he purposes to be.” I suppose Sartre might have included women as well. Human beings are far from creating their “essence” (whatever that might mean). We owe this and are “existence” to our biology, and the process of maturation in a physical and social environment. “He” or she exists with or without a purpose (or more than one). Their life may go better doing this as I see purposes as nothing other than goals.
[77] “Consciousness is ‘intentional’: it posits an object in which it sees itself as in a mirror. As in Hegel’s dialectic, object and subject arise together, in fundamental antagonism. Sartre expresses this antagonism in terms already borrowed from Hegel by Marx. The antagonism at the heart of being is that between the ‘in-itself’ and the ‘for-itself’ (the en-soi and the pour-soi). In setting itself up in relation to a fundamentally ‘other’ object, the self creates a separation in its world, a kind of crevasse. I myself occupy this crevasse: it is the realm of nothingness, le néant, which ‘lies coiled in the heart of being, like a worm’.” Now as usual Sartre turns his thoughts into gobbledygook.
[78] “Moreover the self, the pour-soi, can never become an object of its own awareness. It is always the subject, the thing that knows, rather than the object known.” I suppose Sartre has never heard of introspection. It is not always right, but its object is the self.
[86] “But, through the very reciprocity of coercions and autonomies, the law ends up by escaping everyone, and in the revolving moments of totalisation it appears as dialectical Reason, that is to say, external to all because internal to each, and a developing totalisation, though without a totaliser, of all the totalised totalisations and of all the detotalised totalities.” Say, what? At this point I was getting so tired of Sartre. And Scruton agrees in his analyses “Like many words with a liturgical use it is not defined but merely repeated – and applied with such mesmerizing meaninglessness.”
[98] “He [Sartre] admits to owning property, to being married, to striving to be a semi-faithful husband and conscientious father.” This appears to be sexually bias, if not outright misogynistic.
[184] “. . . nonsense is as much a part of communication as what is normally called sense.” This is the view of Gilles Deleuze. Oddly, enough this is inline with the logical positivists. To them anything that cannot be confirmed empirically or proved logically (including mathematics) is technically nonsense, and the kind of metaphysical talk that Deleuze spews, definitely fits the bill.
I guess at this point I gave up making comments as there were still over a hundred pages left.
I can’t say I particularly like this book as it was filled with the spewings of many postmodernists. Still I did give it 3 stars.
It is hard to recommend this book to any particular readership. I suppose if you have an interest in the political left, and far left at that, from a postmodernist perspective the book could have some appeal. That’s the thing, the book is not about the liberal left of say the Democratic party in the United States, so it may unfairly paint these into the far left of these postmodernists.
The following comments are based on specific pieces from the book. Pages are in brackets [], using Kindle pagination.
[77] “In an extraordinary combination of philosophical argument, psychological observation and lyrical evocation, Sartre sets out to describe the ordeal and the task of consciousness, in a world that has no meaning other than the meaning that I, through my freedom, can impress on it.” I have no problem with this, except I don’t think of it as an ordeal, more like an adventure. Also, meaning is often a collective enterprise, where most meaning is derive from a collective effort.
[77] “Man must make his own essence, and even his existence is, in a sense, an achievement: he exists fully only when he is what he purposes to be.” I suppose Sartre might have included women as well. Human beings are far from creating their “essence” (whatever that might mean). We owe this and are “existence” to our biology, and the process of maturation in a physical and social environment. “He” or she exists with or without a purpose (or more than one). Their life may go better doing this as I see purposes as nothing other than goals.
[77] “Consciousness is ‘intentional’: it posits an object in which it sees itself as in a mirror. As in Hegel’s dialectic, object and subject arise together, in fundamental antagonism. Sartre expresses this antagonism in terms already borrowed from Hegel by Marx. The antagonism at the heart of being is that between the ‘in-itself’ and the ‘for-itself’ (the en-soi and the pour-soi). In setting itself up in relation to a fundamentally ‘other’ object, the self creates a separation in its world, a kind of crevasse. I myself occupy this crevasse: it is the realm of nothingness, le néant, which ‘lies coiled in the heart of being, like a worm’.” Now as usual Sartre turns his thoughts into gobbledygook.
[78] “Moreover the self, the pour-soi, can never become an object of its own awareness. It is always the subject, the thing that knows, rather than the object known.” I suppose Sartre has never heard of introspection. It is not always right, but its object is the self.
[86] “But, through the very reciprocity of coercions and autonomies, the law ends up by escaping everyone, and in the revolving moments of totalisation it appears as dialectical Reason, that is to say, external to all because internal to each, and a developing totalisation, though without a totaliser, of all the totalised totalisations and of all the detotalised totalities.” Say, what? At this point I was getting so tired of Sartre. And Scruton agrees in his analyses “Like many words with a liturgical use it is not defined but merely repeated – and applied with such mesmerizing meaninglessness.”
[98] “He [Sartre] admits to owning property, to being married, to striving to be a semi-faithful husband and conscientious father.” This appears to be sexually bias, if not outright misogynistic.
[184] “. . . nonsense is as much a part of communication as what is normally called sense.” This is the view of Gilles Deleuze. Oddly, enough this is inline with the logical positivists. To them anything that cannot be confirmed empirically or proved logically (including mathematics) is technically nonsense, and the kind of metaphysical talk that Deleuze spews, definitely fits the bill.
I guess at this point I gave up making comments as there were still over a hundred pages left.
I can’t say I particularly like this book as it was filled with the spewings of many postmodernists. Still I did give it 3 stars.
It is hard to recommend this book to any particular readership. I suppose if you have an interest in the political left, and far left at that, from a postmodernist perspective the book could have some appeal. That’s the thing, the book is not about the liberal left of say the Democratic party in the United States, so it may unfairly paint these into the far left of these postmodernists.
April 17, 2017
What can I say about this book? One word is Ruthless, between that English Wit and Argument directed for once at the right people, by the time you get to the end of the book you get a clear sense of who the Left really is and what they really want, however the text itself is intellectual not necessarily in an abstracted way (which Mr. Scruton exposes perfectly is the a feature of Leftist thinkers as they try to escape from reality in their rejection of the empirical) but in a way I think that those who apply themselves to the book could grasp his rebuttals of the litany of leftists thinkers found in his book. Of course, Mr. Scruton shows his intellectual honesty and acknowledges certain points wherein these thinkers had something right in the midst of their jaundiced view of the world as well.
By the time you get through the book you get a sense that these thinkers (both long dead and contemporary to us) are essentially: Ironic persons who having rejected any notion of reality perceive and explain everything in abstracted terms of power and revolution, who in their mostly paranoid but sometimes understandable concerns in the name of overcoming oppression become the very thing they sought to fight against - therefore the worst tragedy of all is they no longer perceive their own irony. He shows us that all these thinkers were themselves victims of oppression (by time, by circumstance and location), and that their experiences have totally colored and unhinged their thoughts.
The book does end on a somewhat hopeful note, obviously this book is a polemic against the very people responsible for producing what we see coming to fruition in our own time, especially on college campuses and the highly politicized / ideological warfare that is going on in media and culture, despite this, he proposes in the last chapter - in a cursory manner having written elsewhere - what we can do and in his proposition though you can still clearly see the contrast of how exactly the New Left/Radical Left seeks to build a world that they ironically (at least in their words) seek to avoid.
This book is not only a refutation but a warning, and as a Traditional Catholic reviewing this book I am reminded of a certain Marian Apparition (Our Lady of Fatima - 1917) warning us that unless certain steps were taken, 'the errors of Russia' would sweep throughout the world, this book shows us exactly who the horsemen were who had made this come to pass. Also, the author makes no bones in saying that this Secular Humanism, this New Leftism is in fact a religion, and idolatry with its own tenets and dogmas [silencing dissent as well], yet another irony from those who claim to be shattering dogmas, they are not only out to destroy all we inherited from our past (a mark of ingratitude) but out to construct a new world from the top-down (a mark of pride) with its own intellectual class leading the charge even if the actual 'proletariat' disagrees with such a world.
By the time you get through the book you get a sense that these thinkers (both long dead and contemporary to us) are essentially: Ironic persons who having rejected any notion of reality perceive and explain everything in abstracted terms of power and revolution, who in their mostly paranoid but sometimes understandable concerns in the name of overcoming oppression become the very thing they sought to fight against - therefore the worst tragedy of all is they no longer perceive their own irony. He shows us that all these thinkers were themselves victims of oppression (by time, by circumstance and location), and that their experiences have totally colored and unhinged their thoughts.
The book does end on a somewhat hopeful note, obviously this book is a polemic against the very people responsible for producing what we see coming to fruition in our own time, especially on college campuses and the highly politicized / ideological warfare that is going on in media and culture, despite this, he proposes in the last chapter - in a cursory manner having written elsewhere - what we can do and in his proposition though you can still clearly see the contrast of how exactly the New Left/Radical Left seeks to build a world that they ironically (at least in their words) seek to avoid.
This book is not only a refutation but a warning, and as a Traditional Catholic reviewing this book I am reminded of a certain Marian Apparition (Our Lady of Fatima - 1917) warning us that unless certain steps were taken, 'the errors of Russia' would sweep throughout the world, this book shows us exactly who the horsemen were who had made this come to pass. Also, the author makes no bones in saying that this Secular Humanism, this New Leftism is in fact a religion, and idolatry with its own tenets and dogmas [silencing dissent as well], yet another irony from those who claim to be shattering dogmas, they are not only out to destroy all we inherited from our past (a mark of ingratitude) but out to construct a new world from the top-down (a mark of pride) with its own intellectual class leading the charge even if the actual 'proletariat' disagrees with such a world.
July 28, 2019
There's an old saying that goes something like, "Never argue with a fool. He will drag you down to his level and then beat you with experience." While this quote doesn't apply perfectly to Roger Scruton's Fools, Frauds and Firebrands, it is the one that came to mind as I tried to think through my assessment of it. Scruton is a first-rate writer and thinker, but his clarity of pen and mind is subdued throughout this book by attempting to deal with what he appropriately calls the "nonsense machine" - the thought emanating from the "New Left" intellectuals since the 1960s.
Scruton begins the book with a Chapter titled "What is Left," in which he attempts to not only define the broad beliefs of the New Left, but also to offer a high-level critique of them. Since he is dealing with overarching concepts, this chapter is more coherent than all but the final one (for reasons I will get to in a moment). In this first chapter, though, Scruton notes how the left's incessant focus on concepts like liberation, equality, and social justice is self-contradictory, as each of these abstract ideas conflict with each other in the real world.
He writes, "Liberation of the victim is a restless cause, since new victims always appear over the horizon as the last ones escape into the void. ...[Liberation of many types] have been absorbed into the more recent leftist agendas, to be enshrined in laws and committees overseen by a censorious officialdom. Gradually the old norms of social order have been marginalized, or even penalized as violations of 'human rights.' Indeed, the cause of 'liberation' has seen the proliferation of more laws than were ever invented to suppress it - just think of what is not ordained in the cause of 'non-discrimination.'"
Similarly, he continues, the idea of social justice takes the idea of equality before the law and turns it into an unattainable ideal. He writes that “the goal of 'social justice' is no longer equality before the law, or the equal claim to the rights of citizenship, as these were advocated at the Enlightenment. ...behind the goal of 'social justice' there marches another and more dogged egalitarian mentality, which believes that inequality in whatever sphere - property, leisure, legal privilege, social rank, educational opportunities, or whatever else we may wish for ourselves and our children - is unjust until proven otherwise. In every sphere in which the social position of individuals might be compared, equality is the default position. ...the most important point to notice is that it is an argument that allows nothing to stand in its way. No existing custom, institution, law or hierarchy; no tradition, distinction, rule or piety can trump equality, if it cannot provide itself with independent credentials. Everything that does not conform to the egalitarian goal must be pulled down and built again, and the mere fact that some custom or institution has been handed down and accepted is no argument in its favour. In this way 'social justice' becomes a barely concealed demand for the 'clean sweep' of history that revolutionaries have always attempted."
Scruton waits until the final chapter to fully explain why this 'clean sweep' is detrimental to society, but here the point is sufficiently made that modern leftist ideas use the language of equality and liberty to disguise their real goal of completely remaking society. Having thus summarized the leftist position, Scruton then descends to the depths of their thinking in the subsequent chapters.
Most of the following chapters are organized around the leftist intellectuals in specific countries - Hobsbawm and Thompson in England, Dworkin and Galbraith in America, Sarte and Foucalt in France, and so on. By using these figures as his subjects for analysis, Scruton makes it clear that he intends to address not necessarily political leftism so much as philosophical leftism. Of course, philosophy affects politics, but philosophers have a tendency to speak even less clearly than politicians, and so Scruton is required to deal with a whole range of thinkers whose intellectual opacity colors Scruton's attempts to explain and refute their positions. Several times, and using quotes as examples, Scruton notes the unintelligibility of these philosophers, who invent either words or new meanings for existing words, and hide them in impenetrable sentences. Scruton notes that this is not infrequently an intended features of their writings, as these thinkers, having discarded conventions in other areas of life, also dismiss the established norms of language.
All of this had the effect, for me, of making the middle of the book a slog to read through. Occasionally Scruton will break through with a point of clarity regarding how these philosophies have influenced Western culture, but most of the time he is "dragged down" to their level of clarity. Of course, it's very possible that my experience with this section is a result of being mostly unfamiliar with the thinkers Scruton is critiquing, but it seems to me that these chapters would be most useful to those who have already been exposed to them - and such people have my sincere condolences.
Fortunately, the clarity in Scruton's own thought comes shining back through the clouds in the final chapter, "What is Right?" Here Scruton attempts to put forward a positive vision of how conservatism differs from the New Left, and how it views humanity and society. He, too, admits to being confused by his subjects' philosophies, writing, "I therefore search the writings of Hobsbawm, Thompson, Badiou, Lukacs and Adorno in vain for a description of how the 'equality of being' advocated in their fraught manifestoes is to be achieved. Who controls what and how in the realm of pure equality, and what is done to ensure the ambitious, the attractive, the energetic and the intelligent does not upset whatever pattern it is that their wise masters might impose on them? Everything remains on the level of hunting, fishing and literary criticism promised in The German Ideology. And when, in the writings of Adorno, I discover that the alternative to the capitalist system is utopia I congratulate the writer for his honesty, since that is another way of saying that there is no alternative. ...They propose a society from which all that makes society possible - law, property, custom, hierarchy, family, negotiation, government, institutions - has been removed. ...the sum of the New Left's commitment...{is that} we know nothing of the socialist future, save only that it is both necessary and desirable. Our concern is with the 'compelling case against the present,' which leads us to destroy what lack the knowledge to replace."
The alternative, conservative view is that the social institutions that the New Left would overthrow are the very institutions that provide mankind with meaning, the context for his liberty, and the structure through which equality is something meaningful and not an abstraction bent on destruction. In this view, religion, the market economy, the family, and voluntary associations - all of which the New Left thinkers have sought to neuter or destroy - are not only what must be conserved, but what will lead to the peace and prosperity that leftists proclaim as their ideal. That they deal with these ideals in the abstract mirrors their tendency to also view humanity in the abstract, which ultimately means denying a human's humanity when he rejects leftist proposals for his "betterment." The conservative position, concludes Scruton, is the humanitarian one because it concerns itself with how mankind actually lives and prospers.
A friend told me that the opening chapter of this book was worth the price. I would add that the last chapter also justifies it. The reader ventures into the middle chapters, however, at his own peril.
Scruton begins the book with a Chapter titled "What is Left," in which he attempts to not only define the broad beliefs of the New Left, but also to offer a high-level critique of them. Since he is dealing with overarching concepts, this chapter is more coherent than all but the final one (for reasons I will get to in a moment). In this first chapter, though, Scruton notes how the left's incessant focus on concepts like liberation, equality, and social justice is self-contradictory, as each of these abstract ideas conflict with each other in the real world.
He writes, "Liberation of the victim is a restless cause, since new victims always appear over the horizon as the last ones escape into the void. ...[Liberation of many types] have been absorbed into the more recent leftist agendas, to be enshrined in laws and committees overseen by a censorious officialdom. Gradually the old norms of social order have been marginalized, or even penalized as violations of 'human rights.' Indeed, the cause of 'liberation' has seen the proliferation of more laws than were ever invented to suppress it - just think of what is not ordained in the cause of 'non-discrimination.'"
Similarly, he continues, the idea of social justice takes the idea of equality before the law and turns it into an unattainable ideal. He writes that “the goal of 'social justice' is no longer equality before the law, or the equal claim to the rights of citizenship, as these were advocated at the Enlightenment. ...behind the goal of 'social justice' there marches another and more dogged egalitarian mentality, which believes that inequality in whatever sphere - property, leisure, legal privilege, social rank, educational opportunities, or whatever else we may wish for ourselves and our children - is unjust until proven otherwise. In every sphere in which the social position of individuals might be compared, equality is the default position. ...the most important point to notice is that it is an argument that allows nothing to stand in its way. No existing custom, institution, law or hierarchy; no tradition, distinction, rule or piety can trump equality, if it cannot provide itself with independent credentials. Everything that does not conform to the egalitarian goal must be pulled down and built again, and the mere fact that some custom or institution has been handed down and accepted is no argument in its favour. In this way 'social justice' becomes a barely concealed demand for the 'clean sweep' of history that revolutionaries have always attempted."
Scruton waits until the final chapter to fully explain why this 'clean sweep' is detrimental to society, but here the point is sufficiently made that modern leftist ideas use the language of equality and liberty to disguise their real goal of completely remaking society. Having thus summarized the leftist position, Scruton then descends to the depths of their thinking in the subsequent chapters.
Most of the following chapters are organized around the leftist intellectuals in specific countries - Hobsbawm and Thompson in England, Dworkin and Galbraith in America, Sarte and Foucalt in France, and so on. By using these figures as his subjects for analysis, Scruton makes it clear that he intends to address not necessarily political leftism so much as philosophical leftism. Of course, philosophy affects politics, but philosophers have a tendency to speak even less clearly than politicians, and so Scruton is required to deal with a whole range of thinkers whose intellectual opacity colors Scruton's attempts to explain and refute their positions. Several times, and using quotes as examples, Scruton notes the unintelligibility of these philosophers, who invent either words or new meanings for existing words, and hide them in impenetrable sentences. Scruton notes that this is not infrequently an intended features of their writings, as these thinkers, having discarded conventions in other areas of life, also dismiss the established norms of language.
All of this had the effect, for me, of making the middle of the book a slog to read through. Occasionally Scruton will break through with a point of clarity regarding how these philosophies have influenced Western culture, but most of the time he is "dragged down" to their level of clarity. Of course, it's very possible that my experience with this section is a result of being mostly unfamiliar with the thinkers Scruton is critiquing, but it seems to me that these chapters would be most useful to those who have already been exposed to them - and such people have my sincere condolences.
Fortunately, the clarity in Scruton's own thought comes shining back through the clouds in the final chapter, "What is Right?" Here Scruton attempts to put forward a positive vision of how conservatism differs from the New Left, and how it views humanity and society. He, too, admits to being confused by his subjects' philosophies, writing, "I therefore search the writings of Hobsbawm, Thompson, Badiou, Lukacs and Adorno in vain for a description of how the 'equality of being' advocated in their fraught manifestoes is to be achieved. Who controls what and how in the realm of pure equality, and what is done to ensure the ambitious, the attractive, the energetic and the intelligent does not upset whatever pattern it is that their wise masters might impose on them? Everything remains on the level of hunting, fishing and literary criticism promised in The German Ideology. And when, in the writings of Adorno, I discover that the alternative to the capitalist system is utopia I congratulate the writer for his honesty, since that is another way of saying that there is no alternative. ...They propose a society from which all that makes society possible - law, property, custom, hierarchy, family, negotiation, government, institutions - has been removed. ...the sum of the New Left's commitment...{is that} we know nothing of the socialist future, save only that it is both necessary and desirable. Our concern is with the 'compelling case against the present,' which leads us to destroy what lack the knowledge to replace."
The alternative, conservative view is that the social institutions that the New Left would overthrow are the very institutions that provide mankind with meaning, the context for his liberty, and the structure through which equality is something meaningful and not an abstraction bent on destruction. In this view, religion, the market economy, the family, and voluntary associations - all of which the New Left thinkers have sought to neuter or destroy - are not only what must be conserved, but what will lead to the peace and prosperity that leftists proclaim as their ideal. That they deal with these ideals in the abstract mirrors their tendency to also view humanity in the abstract, which ultimately means denying a human's humanity when he rejects leftist proposals for his "betterment." The conservative position, concludes Scruton, is the humanitarian one because it concerns itself with how mankind actually lives and prospers.
A friend told me that the opening chapter of this book was worth the price. I would add that the last chapter also justifies it. The reader ventures into the middle chapters, however, at his own peril.
Read
April 5, 2020It must be very difficult to write a book about the philosophy of gobbledegook and drivel. Sadly I only really understood the introduction and conclusion.
August 11, 2016
An excellent book by Roger Scruton. He sweeps the tradition of 20th century leftist intellectuals, their goals.
As you read, the book, you will quickly realize how most of the institutions, economy and even language is labeled as bourgeois capitalist. Scruton points out, all thinkers in the left fail to explain, an alternative, make the reader to live in an abstract concept distanced from reality. He argues that, most of the thinkers fail to see the bloodshed as a result. Revolution, is their anthem.
Here's an excerpt,
"Over-determination designates the following essential quality of contradiction: the reflection in contradiction itself of its conditions of existence, that is, of its situation in the structure in dominance of the complex whole. The is not an univocal situation. It is not just its situation 'in principle' (nor) just its situation 'in fact'"
Did you understand? No, you are not supposed to, because, it is immersed in extra-immense prose, while crying out 'let this not be doubted.'
They use newspeak, do not want anyone to challenge them, in a way, their writings are filled with incoherent thoughts. Whoever disagrees is labeled bourgeois. Even to use reason is bourgeois, thus one has to abandon it. In Postmodern culture, everything is permitted, it is vital to forbid, the forbidden.
No wonder, how Scruton managed to read them all. Kudos to him
A great read to understand, all the New Left.
Deus Vult
--Gottfried
As you read, the book, you will quickly realize how most of the institutions, economy and even language is labeled as bourgeois capitalist. Scruton points out, all thinkers in the left fail to explain, an alternative, make the reader to live in an abstract concept distanced from reality. He argues that, most of the thinkers fail to see the bloodshed as a result. Revolution, is their anthem.
Here's an excerpt,
"Over-determination designates the following essential quality of contradiction: the reflection in contradiction itself of its conditions of existence, that is, of its situation in the structure in dominance of the complex whole. The is not an univocal situation. It is not just its situation 'in principle' (nor) just its situation 'in fact'"
Did you understand? No, you are not supposed to, because, it is immersed in extra-immense prose, while crying out 'let this not be doubted.'
They use newspeak, do not want anyone to challenge them, in a way, their writings are filled with incoherent thoughts. Whoever disagrees is labeled bourgeois. Even to use reason is bourgeois, thus one has to abandon it. In Postmodern culture, everything is permitted, it is vital to forbid, the forbidden.
No wonder, how Scruton managed to read them all. Kudos to him
A great read to understand, all the New Left.
Deus Vult
--Gottfried
April 1, 2017
Desde a teoria e prática revolucionária de Gramsci e Habermas, passando pela paranoia do Foucault, a renúncia de tudo e todos por Sartre, ou ainda a crítica dos excessos do capitalismo da esquerda americana, é inegável a contribuição dos autores da nova esquerda na criação das reservas de mercado intelectual nas ciências humanas. Embora diferentes entre si, todos eles compartilham o marxismo como uma teologia da história, marcando a transição da era "clássica" para a "burguesa", sendo a última responsável pelo surgimento dos demônios da vida moderna: a família nuclear, a exploração pelo trabalho, o patriarcado, o machismo, a loucura etc. Ou seja, um ponto de partida ingenuamente errado e que inviabiliza até a mais sofisticada teoria. A partir desse ponto, tudo se torna basicamente contorcionismo mental ou um exercício cada vez mais criativo de reinvenção da roda. Vida que segue.
June 26, 2020
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και πιο πρόσφατα: https://antifono.gr/%ce%b5%ce%bd%ce%a...
https://neoplanodion.gr/2020/01/27/%c...
και πιο πρόσφατα: https://antifono.gr/%ce%b5%ce%bd%ce%a...
https://neoplanodion.gr/2020/01/27/%c...
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 1, 2020
The heat that comes off this book almost rings with the audible sizzle of crackles and pops. Don’t let Sir Roger Scruton fool you with his gentlemanly tone, his philosopher’s tussled hair, his irenic smile; the man was an absolute beast, and here he digs his teeth into pretentious intellectual elites like a hungry lioness tears into a gazelle. While many are dazzled by the illusory smoke-screening jargon of anti-capitalism, anti-hegemony, postmodern, utopian tomfoolery, Scruton walks into the room like a Marshwiggle with a burnt foot and declares in no uncertain terms that the emperor is in his birthday suit. *a full review coming in November 2020 issue of Permanent Things*
July 17, 2021
This book was not nearly as gossipy as I had hoped and as others had criticized it for being.
Professor Scruton's Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left evidently is an updated version of Thinkers of the New Left
but not having read the earlier version, this review will only focus on the updated version which includes chapters on:
-Hobsbawn and Thompson (chapter 2: Resentment in Britain)
-Galbraith and Dworkin (chapter 3: Disdain in America)
-Sartre and Foucault (chapter 4: Liberation in France)
-Downhill and Habermas (and Lukács, Adorno) (chapter 5: Tedium in Germany)
-Althusser, Lacan and Deleuze (chapter 6: Nonsense in Paris)
-Gramsci and Said (and Williams, Anderson) (chapter 7: Culture Wars Worldwide)
-Badiou and Zizek (chapter 8: The Kraken Wakes)
Gone (relegated to the dustbin of history) are Laing and Bahro.
The book is bookended by a chapter on defining the new left "What is Left?" (Chapter 1) and Scruton giving an outline of a positive philosophy and alternative to the left "What is Right?" (Chapter 9).
For those critics who think that Scruton was too person, I think he wasn't personal enough. He focused mostly on the fact that these thinkers were fools, in that he dissected their philosophies and how their thinking is/was wrong, incongruous with itself and reality. Sartre's, Foucault's, Althusser's personal lives were disasters by most standards, but Scruton is apologetic and even dismissive of their self and other-destructive behaviour. He extends a level of sympathy for those intellectuals which whom he disagrees, but who he recognized as truly intelligent with deep insights. I think that great intelligence doesn't negate the damage done by their ideas on the countless victims in Maoist China, communist Vietnam, and Khmer Rouge Cambodia, or ex-lovers, wives, children.
I would have like a little more focus on the fact that many of these "revolutionaries" are/were frauds espousing the overthrow of a system from which they benefit, become rich, sell thousands of books, have tenure at universities, are invited to government functions (or in the case of Foucault, invited to contribute to rewriting the legal code), enjoy freedom from imprisonment (Sartre) and many other privileges not afforded to the actual "working class".
They are even freely and openly allowed to espouse murderous regimes, like Stalinist Russia and Maoist China (as long as the murderers are motivated the left-wing Utopianism, a freedom (and even institutional support) not afforded to right-wing intellectuals, nor even to left-wing intellectuals in the societies that they are praising (USSR, PRC) if they happen to stray even minutely from the established doctrine. These champagne-socialists claim to represent the proletarian working class (if this "class" even exists anymore in the west) but have little to no contact with the working class and their political ideas and goals are completely antithetical to each-other. "It seems that the proletarian thinking is not to be found in the works of the proletarian writers [Lawrence, Conrad, Céline] but only in the Marxist classics." (p. 132)
For those who think that Scruton dismisses and condemns some of these quasi-intellectuals for their inability to express their ideas clearly, those reviewers have clearly missed the mark. Scruton isn't incensed at their lack of writing skills, rather, he is incensed at their use of deliberately garbled language "Newspeak" to obfuscate either simple ideas (frauds) or irrationality (fools). Much of the large quotes from some of the figures reminded me of Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science, the Sokal Affair, "obscurity could be read as proof of profundity and originality too great to be encompassed by ordinary words" (p. 193). Most of these "experts" or "philosophers" "historians" and "economists" have found little success in their own fields, but have been willingly and openly adopted by fields which require significantly less scholarly rigor, like Gender studies, Race studies, and Sociology.
Overall, Scruton's book is devastating, I even felt bad for some of those fraudsters by the end of their sections. It periodically gets bogged down in minute philosophical detail, details that can more easy be dismissed by "The sceptical English reader [as] all these suffering observers are so many withdrawn adolescents, who flatter themselves that their revulsion is a kind of holiness." (p. 77) These ideas have little-to-no connection to the real world and are not taken seriously by anyone outside of the ivory-tower academia and some gullible undergraduates.
These academic "intellectuals", who enjoy such positions of power and authority are not satisfied with their own power positions and hope to overthrow a system which has benefitted them immensely, in the hope of taking up dictatorial positions in a new order, where they will benevolently rule from on high to the benefit of the "working class" "Intellectuals are naturally attracted by the idea of a planned society, in the belief that they will be in charge of it." (p. 12) "they have the money, but we have the brains." (p. 41)
Allow me to improve Scruton's conclusion: "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 signsof racist, sexist, imperialist or colonialist ways of thinking" (p. 275)
Professor Scruton's Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left evidently is an updated version of Thinkers of the New Left
but not having read the earlier version, this review will only focus on the updated version which includes chapters on:
-Hobsbawn and Thompson (chapter 2: Resentment in Britain)
-Galbraith and Dworkin (chapter 3: Disdain in America)
-Sartre and Foucault (chapter 4: Liberation in France)
-Downhill and Habermas (and Lukács, Adorno) (chapter 5: Tedium in Germany)
-Althusser, Lacan and Deleuze (chapter 6: Nonsense in Paris)
-Gramsci and Said (and Williams, Anderson) (chapter 7: Culture Wars Worldwide)
-Badiou and Zizek (chapter 8: The Kraken Wakes)
Gone (relegated to the dustbin of history) are Laing and Bahro.
The book is bookended by a chapter on defining the new left "What is Left?" (Chapter 1) and Scruton giving an outline of a positive philosophy and alternative to the left "What is Right?" (Chapter 9).
For those critics who think that Scruton was too person, I think he wasn't personal enough. He focused mostly on the fact that these thinkers were fools, in that he dissected their philosophies and how their thinking is/was wrong, incongruous with itself and reality. Sartre's, Foucault's, Althusser's personal lives were disasters by most standards, but Scruton is apologetic and even dismissive of their self and other-destructive behaviour. He extends a level of sympathy for those intellectuals which whom he disagrees, but who he recognized as truly intelligent with deep insights. I think that great intelligence doesn't negate the damage done by their ideas on the countless victims in Maoist China, communist Vietnam, and Khmer Rouge Cambodia, or ex-lovers, wives, children.
I would have like a little more focus on the fact that many of these "revolutionaries" are/were frauds espousing the overthrow of a system from which they benefit, become rich, sell thousands of books, have tenure at universities, are invited to government functions (or in the case of Foucault, invited to contribute to rewriting the legal code), enjoy freedom from imprisonment (Sartre) and many other privileges not afforded to the actual "working class".
They are even freely and openly allowed to espouse murderous regimes, like Stalinist Russia and Maoist China (as long as the murderers are motivated the left-wing Utopianism, a freedom (and even institutional support) not afforded to right-wing intellectuals, nor even to left-wing intellectuals in the societies that they are praising (USSR, PRC) if they happen to stray even minutely from the established doctrine. These champagne-socialists claim to represent the proletarian working class (if this "class" even exists anymore in the west) but have little to no contact with the working class and their political ideas and goals are completely antithetical to each-other. "It seems that the proletarian thinking is not to be found in the works of the proletarian writers [Lawrence, Conrad, Céline] but only in the Marxist classics." (p. 132)
For those who think that Scruton dismisses and condemns some of these quasi-intellectuals for their inability to express their ideas clearly, those reviewers have clearly missed the mark. Scruton isn't incensed at their lack of writing skills, rather, he is incensed at their use of deliberately garbled language "Newspeak" to obfuscate either simple ideas (frauds) or irrationality (fools). Much of the large quotes from some of the figures reminded me of Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science, the Sokal Affair, "obscurity could be read as proof of profundity and originality too great to be encompassed by ordinary words" (p. 193). Most of these "experts" or "philosophers" "historians" and "economists" have found little success in their own fields, but have been willingly and openly adopted by fields which require significantly less scholarly rigor, like Gender studies, Race studies, and Sociology.
Overall, Scruton's book is devastating, I even felt bad for some of those fraudsters by the end of their sections. It periodically gets bogged down in minute philosophical detail, details that can more easy be dismissed by "The sceptical English reader [as] all these suffering observers are so many withdrawn adolescents, who flatter themselves that their revulsion is a kind of holiness." (p. 77) These ideas have little-to-no connection to the real world and are not taken seriously by anyone outside of the ivory-tower academia and some gullible undergraduates.
These academic "intellectuals", who enjoy such positions of power and authority are not satisfied with their own power positions and hope to overthrow a system which has benefitted them immensely, in the hope of taking up dictatorial positions in a new order, where they will benevolently rule from on high to the benefit of the "working class" "Intellectuals are naturally attracted by the idea of a planned society, in the belief that they will be in charge of it." (p. 12) "they have the money, but we have the brains." (p. 41)
Allow me to improve Scruton's conclusion: "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
April 17, 2017
As someone who has to suffer the New Left's Newspeak and their ideological lies on a daily basis, this book has been the best piece of literature I could have read. Thank you, Amazon. Not only does it deal with the incoherence that "thinkers" like Lacan, Zizek, Foucalt, etc. show in their books, but also the extreme nonsense which is Marxism and the Leftist ideology. A concise and tremendous book. Loved it.
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