Nick Boreham

“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 similarity between communism and fascism, both as theory and as practice, and their common antagonism to parliamentary and constitutional forms of government. Even if we accept the – highly fortuitous – identification of National Socialism and Italian Fascism, to speak of either as the true political opposite of communism is to betray the most superficial understanding of 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. Communism, like fascism, involved the attempt to create a mass popular movement and a state bound together under the rule of a single party, in which there will be total cohesion around a common goal. It involved the elimination of opposition, by whatever means, and the replacement of ordered dispute between parties by clandestine ‘discussion’ within the single ruling elite. It involved taking control – ‘in the name of the people’ – of the means of communication and education, and instilling a principle of command throughout the economy. Both movements regarded law as optional and constitutional constraints as irrelevant – for both were essentially revolutionary, led from above by an ‘iron discipline’. Both aimed to achieve a new kind of social order, unmediated by institutions, displaying an immediate and fraternal cohesiveness. And in pursuit of this ideal association – called a fascio by nineteenth-century Italian socialists – each movement created a form of military government, involving the total mobilization of the entire populace,3 which could no longer do even the most peaceful-seeming things except in a spirit of war, and with an officer in charge. This mobilization was put on comic display, in the great parades and festivals that the two ideologies created for their own glorification.”
― Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left

“Two accusations against our political inheritance have lodged in the brains that I have examined in this book: first, that ‘capitalist’ society is founded on power and domination; second, that ‘capitalism’ means ‘commodification’, the reduction of people to things, and the fetishizing of things as agents.”
― Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left

“To modern man,’ Hayek argues, ‘the belief that all law governing human action is the product of legislation appears so obvious that the contention that law is older than law-making has almost the character of a paradox. Yet there can be no doubt that law existed for ages before it occurred to man that he could make or alter it.”
― Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left

“To put the point another way: the Marxist theory of history, which explains all historical development as the product of changes in the economic infrastructure, is false.”
― Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left