These postulants, scholastic monks, and deacons insinuated themselves into contemporary politics as revolutionary socialist bishops, cardinals, and even a Pope in the person of rabid atheist Richard Dawkins.
One subtext of this work is the strong evidence that last century’s Marxian theology has become this century’s New Left religion. Indeed, it merely rebranded thanks to the zealous priesthood of the ‘New Left’ Marxists in Europe and America. Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands, is the intellectual chronicle of those seminary and post-ordination days for that priesthood. In this, he demonstrates more character virtue than the far-left academics who vindictively purged him from his university teaching and writing career.īut ‘Old Left’ Communism did not die at the hands of ‘Iron Lady’ Margaret Thatcher, ‘Solidarity’ inspired Pope John Paul II, and Ronald Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’. Though brutal in his exorcism of Marxian devils, Professor Scruton takes patient pains to give both substance and style credit where credit is due. If, however, you crave a road map of the intellectual car crashes that led us to our common social fatality, then, by all means, get this book. If you crave French nuanced literary criticism, then this book is not for you. Resting on sound philosophical research, his grammar, syntax, and diction are the results of immaculate conception. Originally published in 1985 as simply Thinkers of the New Left before the collapse of the old Soviet Union, this iteration of Scruton’s communist autopsy drills down to the core presumptions of communism’s decrepit corpse. Even JFK’s pet economist, John Kenneth Galbraith gets a good waxing. With relentless surgical precision, philosophy professor Roger Scruton peels away layers of decayed Marxian mumbo-jumbo by later day acolytes from Sartre to Habermas, from Dworkin and Deleuze, to Lucan and Zizek, in his book Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands. Fake news, identity politics, corporate shame, the evil 1%, globalism, Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ+, ANTIFA, and now our shooting cultural war all stem from the clever theology of group rights ordained by German theologian Karl Marx. Scruton wants one's inference to tumble out of these pages at the end. How did the very core idea of Western culture and law change from individual natural rights, seeking only truth, to contrived group rights, seeking only power? With tong and scalpel, Scruton offers the reader a narrative answer to a simple question.
Even if you don’t know the difference between a ‘dialectic’ and a ‘praxis,’ your lack of deep philosophical literacy will not impede the read. Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands, written by Roger Scruton, is precisely the book that every student of modern political science and/or economics should read.
0 kommentar(er)
