This arrangement enables him to situate their thought in a concrete historical context and, in the fashion of a sketch artist, to provide many insightful observations on the national character of each country. Scruton organizes the first part of the book by grouping the earlier thinkers by nation-Britain, America, France, and Germany. Readers of Habermas keep hoping to find more in his “theory of communicative action than his inability to communicate it,” but their quest so far has been in vain.
The very tedium of his thought soothes the intellectual class and brings a comforting feel of normalcy. It has found the perfect exemplar in Jürgen Habermas, its leading postwar thinker, whose “barely readable but impeccably orthodox books” defend a bureaucratic version of the welfare state. Given that nation’s troubled experience with its philosophers in the first half of the 20th century, the contemporary leftist intellectual establishment has looked more for reassurance and respectability than for displays of brilliance. Scruton’s sociological eye is impeccable as he sketches a slightly different relationship of thinker to admirers in Germany. Thinkers from Sartre on were able to enjoy renown by excoriating the so-called bourgeoisie, all the while expecting to be celebrated-and being celebrated-by a large portion of this same class. Scruton writes of Lacan that he “discovered the infinite power of the meaningless, when the meaningless is used to exert a personal charisma.” Lacan’s deification, which he “not only demanded, but also, to the disgrace of human nature, received,” embodies a regrettable facet of the leftist philosopher’s social position in France. Scruton’s patience, however, does have its limits, and at points he turns to unmasking the unmaskers. Acolytes of these thinkers who read this book might find themselves for the first time getting a sense of what their masters are actually saying-or not. Give credit to Scruton as well for going to great lengths to try to decipher the opaque prose of the four horsemen of obscurantism: Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Gilles Deleuze, and Alain Badiou.
BEHIND ENEMY LINES BOOK SERIES
He regards Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les Mots ( The Words, 1963) as a “masterpiece of autobiography” admires Michel Foucault’s “imagination and intellectual fluency have generated theories, concepts and insights by the score” and admits Eric Hobsbawm’s series on the rise of the modern world is “a remarkable work of synthesis, seriously misleading only in the fourth volume.” Though in the end he is critical of all of the featured thinkers, Scruton readily expresses his appreciation for certain of their intellectual qualities. Yes, as Scruton says, the work is a “provocation,” but it also provides the most comprehensive, serious treatment to date of the development of modern leftist thought. The book’s title may exaggerate its polemical character. In Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands, he takes on the major leftist thinkers of the past century from A (Theodor Adorno, of the famous Frankfurt School of critical theory in the 1930s) to Z (Slavoj Žižek, the contemporary Slovenian thinker touted by Foreign Policy as “a celebrity philosopher”). With his abundance of intellectual capital, Scruton has always had the satisfaction of being able to give more than he receives. At this point, in 2016, Britain’s intellectual establishment is finally relenting somewhat, admitting Scruton back to the edges of the fold. Yet from all appearances he has borne this criticism with remarkable equanimity, showing malice toward only a few and charity for most. (Threats by angered intellectuals led a prominent publisher to stop offering it for sale.) Scruton was a target of political correctness before the term existed. He has the scars to show for it, too, having been ostracized early on from academic life in Britain and having had one of his works face the modern equivalent of a book burning. Along with some 40 books on such subjects as philosophy, religion, architecture, music, wine, and politics, he has written four novels and two operas.įor the readers of this journal, there is the added attraction that Scruton is a conservative-not casually so, but as someone who has proudly worn the label and engaged in the battle of ideas for over half a century.
Scruton’s oeuvre is vast, and, at age 72, is only growing. Breadth of knowledge, intellectual acuity, and a scintillating writing style are just a few of the qualities that make Roger Scruton one of the leading thinkers of our time.
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