fools frauds and firebrands by roger scruton

Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left Scruton praises the philosopher Leszek Kołakowski's Main Currents of Marxism (1976-1978). In Scruton's view, this demonstrates that the New Left does not have 'a system of rationally held beliefs', and is dependent on never questioned assumptions. Īccording to Scruton, while the theories of Karl Marx 'have been essentially refuted' by authors such as the sociologist Max Weber, the economists Eugen Böhm von Bawerk, Ludwig von Mises, and Friedrich Hayek, and the philosopher Karl Popper, the New Left has failed to respond to Marx's critics with 'anything more persuasive than a sneer', even though the major New Left thinkers depend on the central claims of Marxism. According to him, left-wing movements are often led by fanatics, whose rhetoric he compares to that of Maximilien Robespierre. Scruton sees the New Left as the most recent expression of a force that has been prominent in politics since the beginning of the French Revolution. Scruton argues that during the 1960s and 1970s, the thinkers he discusses helped to create an 'oppositional consensus', and that due to its influence 'it ceased to be respectable to defend the customs, institutions, and policy of western states'. In addition to individual chapters on these authors, an introduction and a conclusion provide a general overview of left-wing thought and its social and political significance.

Most of those had earlier appeared in the British conservative magazine The Salisbury Review then edited by Scruton only the chapter on Laing had been published in The Cambridge Review.

Laing, Raymond Williams, Rudolf Bahro, Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Immanuel Wallerstein, Jürgen Habermas, Perry Anderson, György Lukács, John Kenneth Galbraith and Jean-Paul Sartre. Thompson, Ronald Dworkin, Michel Foucault, R. The volume is a collection of essays on fourteen authors who Scruton considers as representatives of the New Left, namely E. Scruton was angered by what he saw as 'excuses for the Gulag' made by scholars such as the historian Eric Hobsbawm. Summary Īccording to Scruton, he was motivated to write Thinkers of the New Left by his experiences in Czechoslovakia under the communist regime, where he worked with the Jan Hus Educational Foundation and attempted to smuggle forbidden literature into the country. Some of the material in the book appeared in reworked form in a 2015 book titled Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left. The book proved controversial and according to Scruton its reception damaged his academic career. Thinkers of the New Left is a book by the conservative English philosopher Roger Scruton published by Longman in 1985, in which the author harshly criticizes the writings of authors he considers as representative of the New Left.

Fools frauds and firebrands by roger scruton