Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left
Written by Roger Scruton
Narrated by Rory Barnett
4/5
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About this audiobook
In Fools, Frauds and Firebrands Scruton asks, What does the Left look like today, and how has it evolved? He charts the transfer of grievances, from the working class to women, gays, and immigrants, asks what we can put in the place of radical egalitarianism, and what explains the continued dominance of antinomian attitudes in the intellectual world. Can there be any foundation for resistance to the leftist agenda without religious faith?
Writing with great clarity, Scruton delivers a devastating critique of modern left-wing thinking.
Roger Scruton
Sir ROGER SCRUTON is a writer and philosopher who has published more than forty books in philosophy and politics, including Kant and An Intelligent Person's Guide to Philosophy. He is widely translated. He is a fellow of the British Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He teaches in both England and America and is a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Washington D.C. He is currently teaching an MA in Philosophy for the University of Buckingham.
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Reviews for Fools, Frauds and Firebrands
60 ratings4 reviews
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5A dumb book of petty arguments with mostly dead philosophers. Camus would have whooped the author.
2 people found this helpful
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Astute combination of reasoned critique and polemic, amplified by quotations from major shrill and barely literate new left writers.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5An 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 - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Cranky. Scruton settles scores with the New Left with a re-release of a 1980's book, rewritten with a poisoned pen, wielded elegantly. I wonder why he wasted the time trashing eccentric ideological non-entinties like Lacan and Zizek. (He dropped the section on R.D. Laing, so he has dropped his attack on the more marginal and less intellectual members of the set).