As he points out, it is perplexing and regrettable that an elderly French professor’s “glamorous detachment” from the dirty work of “real politics” should still possess the power to seduce. Scruton is at his best (and funniest) when trying to make sense of Badiou’s weird confection of historical materialism and Platonic mathematical theory. The discussion of Dworkin, for instance, is undermined by the hyperbolic claim that his mild liberal egalitarianism tends just as surely to a kind of revolutionary sweeping away of custom and tradition as does Žižek’s neo-Leninism. Scruton begins with a ruthless analysis of.

The thinkers who have been most influential on the attitudes of the New Left are examined in this study by one of the leading critics of leftist orientations in modern Western civilization. This desire to provoke sometimes gets the better of him. Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left Audible Audiobook Unabridged Roger Scruton (Author), Rory Barnett (Narrator), & 1 more 527 ratings See all formats and editions Kindle 8.21 Read with Our Free App Audiobook 0. 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 todays most fashionable philosophers. 169.35 2 Used from 125.99 1 New from 169.35. This is not a work of scholarly intellectual history, then, but rather, as Scruton puts it, a “provocation.” His noisy criticisms of left-wing thinkers in the mid-1980s signalled, he recalls, “the beginning of the end for my university career.” Since he no longer has a university career to protect, Scruton can now tweak the nose of academic leftism to his heart’s content. Fools, Frauds and Firebrands (the title tells you everything you need to know) takes in thinkers as diverse as the American liberal political theorists John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin, on the one hand, and European Marxists such as Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, on the other. Scruton, though, casts his net much wider. Despite its subtitle, this book by the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton is not a history of the “New Left.” The original New Left was an intellectual and political tendency that emerged in Britain in the mid-1950s after the Soviet Union’s crushing of the uprising in Hungary, and then reappeared in a different guise in the US during the following decade.

Fools frauds and firebrands