What does Scruton himself mean by “left” or “left wing”? While the book is full of various short-hand summaries of what Scruton means, one or two might help grasp Scruton’s understanding. Scruton is not necessarily using the term “left” or “left-wing” pejoratively, as he claims that the thinkers he examines in the book all use the term to describe themselves.
His target is generally the world of 20 th century philosophy - mainly in the UK and European continent, although in one chapter he treats certain left-wing thinkers in the United States. This is polemics at its fiercest, as Scruton attempts to take 20 th century left-wing thought to task. Scruton is clear at the beginning that this is not a “word-mincing book” (p. Scruton currently resides in the UK, in a piece of land in the country which he and his wife dub “Scrutopia.” He is currently Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford, and is a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Washington, DC. The current book reworks the material, and deletes certain sections. Fools, Frauds and Firebrands is a re-working of a 1985 book by Scruton, Thinkers of the New Left. The result is a devastating critique of modern left-wing thinking.Roger Scruton is a philosopher of the first rank, and is known as a leader of sorts of a kind of high-brow British conservatism (and of conservatism more generally). In Thinkers of the New Left Scruton asks, what does the Left look like today and as it has evolved since 1989? He charts the transfer of grievances from the working class to women, gays and immigrants, asks what can we 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? Scruton's exploration of these important issues is written with skill, perception and at all times with pellucid clarity. In addition to assessments of these thinkers' philosophical and political contributions, the book contains a biographical and bibliographical section summarizing their careers and most important writings.
Laing, Jurgen Habermas, Gyorgy Lukacs, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, Slavoj Zizek, Ralph Milliband and Eric Hobsbawm. He conducts a reappraisal of such major left-wing thinkers as: E. Scruton begins with a ruthless analysis of New Leftism and concludes with a critique of the key strands in its thinking. 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.
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