Reason being, he has himself proceeded to write a veritably high-octane book of dense, yet highly dispassionate, ruthless New Leftism. Indeed, whether by default or some sort of academic vaccination that’s gone risibly wrong, it is cantankerous, if not amusing, that Professor Scruton – who is not only Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford but also Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Centre in Washington, DC – should lean towards ”mad incantations of Zizek” (whose most recent book, Disparities, I reviewed just a few days ago).

Talk about a brazen and altogether elongated (robust) black kettle which, to all intents and utterly non-humble purposes, Scruton appears to have been soundly inoculated with. In light of the above, it’s mighty ironic that in the Introduction of Fools, Frauds and Firebrands – Thinkers of the New Left, Roger Scruton rather deftly writes: ”and I have allowed my publisher, Robin Baird-Smith, to persuade me that a new book might bring some relief to students compelled to chew on the glutinous prose of Deleuze, to treat seriously the mad incantations of Zizek, or to believe that there is more to Habermas’s theory of communicative action than his inability to communicate it.” Hence progressive forces always achieve ‘irreversible changes,’ while reactionary forces are wrong-footed by their contradictory and merely ‘nostalgic’ attempts to defend a doomed social order. Since everything is in motion and the ‘struggle’ between the forces of progress and the forces of reaction is always and everywhere, it is important that the triumph of ideology over reality be constantly recorded and endorsed.

It is always something to ‘fight for,’ and ‘Fight for Peace!,’ ‘Struggle for Peace!’ took their place among the official slogans of the Communist Party.įrom the same source comes the penchant for ‘irreversible’ changes. Peace never appears in Newspeak as a condition of rest and normality.

Fools firebrands and frauds