Fools, Frauds and Firebrands

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 Zizek.

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.

Auteur

Sir Roger Scruton is widely seen as one of the greatest conservative thinkers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and a polymath who wrote a wide array of fiction, non-fiction and reviews. He was the author of over fifty books.

A graduate of Jesus College, Cambridge, Scruton was Professor of Aesthetics at Birkbeck College, London; University Professor at Boston University, and a visiting professor at Oxford University. He was one of the founders of the Salisbury Review, contributed regularly to The Spectator, The Times and the Daily Telegraph *and was for many years wine critic for the *New Statesman. Sir Roger Scruton died in January 2020.

Résumé
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 i ek. 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.

Contenu

Introduction

1 What is Left?
2 Resentment in Britain: Hobsbawm and Thompson
3 Disdain in America: Galbraith and Dworkin
4 Liberation in France: Sartre and Foucault
5 Tedium in Germany: Downhill to Habermas
6 Nonsense in Paris: Althusser, Lacan and Deleuze
7 Culture Wars Worldwide: The New Left from Gramsci to Said
8 The Kraken Wakes: Badiou and Zizek
9 What is Right?

Index of names
Index of subjects