Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands

Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left by Roger Scruton, 288 pages

Thinkers of the New Left began as a series of articles, collected into the book of that title in 1985.  The 2015 Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands is not just a thirtieth anniversary reissue, but also a substantial revision.  Its continuing value is attributable to the fact that its targets are not the political opponents of a day but the ideologues themselves - Galbraith, Sartre, Foucalt, Habermas, Lacan, Gramsci, Said, Badiou, Zizek.  Not that the book is placidly intellectual - the author describes it as "a provocation" and it is certainly provocative, but it is also thoughtful and well-reasoned. 

While Scruton develops an individual criticism for the thought of each of his subjects, certain themes recur.  Most of the thinkers accept some variation of Foucalt's "exposure" of society as nothing more than a power struggle between individuals and institutions of repression.  The "nonsense machine" of cant is employed in order to obfuscate reality and persuade others that capitalism and democracy, each predicated on individual freedom, are in actuality occult systems of domination and subjugation.  All human interaction is reduced to incommensurable power struggles between abstracts, whether abstract individuals (Sartre) or abstract classes (Lukacs).  These abstracts are, in turn, privileged above particular realities, so that the opinions and desires of actual workers can be ignored in favor of the interests of the working class, which can only be divined by the intelligentsia.  This completes a vicarious identification of comfortable intellectuals with the oppressed masses, wherein the worker ends up objectified, not by the market, but by the intellectual who makes of him a fetish.  Above all, the subjects refuse to meaningfully engage with opposing viewpoints, all arguments being rejected beforehand as badthink, excluded by the nonsense machine.  This, more than anything else, demonstrates them to be fundamentally unserious, because uninterested in intellectual work except insofar as it can serve as either an incitement to or a replacement for revolutionary activity.

The serial nature of the original articles shows in the chapters, which generally form self-contained units, but this is a strength rather than a weakness, since it allows Scruton to treat his subjects as individuals rather than as members of the opposition.  Scruton rarely stoops to comment on the personal lives of his subjects, even while he expresses genuine regret at instances where ideological conformity seems to have crippled philosophical development, notably in the cases of Sartre and Lukacs.  Above all, he insists on the particular and the real, on the inherent tension between the ideals of freedom and equality, since any real freedom inevitably produces inequality, and the corresponding importance of the mediating, conserving, mutually-reinforcing roles of civil society, institutional accountability, and the rule of law.