---
product_id: 46742539
title: "Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left"
brand: "bloomsbury continuum"
price: "$23.62"
currency: USD
in_stock: true
reviews_count: 17
category: "Book"
url: https://www.desertcart.us/products/46742539-fools-frauds-and-firebrands-thinkers-of-the-new-left
store_origin: US
region: United States of America
---

# Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left

**Brand:** bloomsbury continuum
**Price:** $23.62
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- **What is this?** Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left by bloomsbury continuum
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## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    Deconstructing the Nonsense Machine
  

*by R***R on Reviewed in the United States on October 19, 2016*

As an undergraduate, I wondered why the curriculum in the humanities was so narrowly focused, and why some of these alleged-brilliant minds were not only convoluted in their theories, but sometimes deliberately obtuse/obscurantist in their writing. As I progressed to graduate school, things got even worse. The "mathemes" struck me as the Leftist's attempt to give their non-theories a kind of mathematical/scientific patina. The gibberish of "the sign and the signifiier," the incessant invocation of "the other," all of this stuff eventually became a bit wearing.Scrutton does a good job in this short work of separating the wheat from the chaff, in addressing the dominant intellectual schools of thought, and the thinkers who made their "institutional march," first through Europe, who are now well-entrenched in American universities. This book is not the paranoid hit piece that either the title nor the cover art would lead one to believe. Scruton gives credit where it is due, especially to Foucault and Sartre, whose conclusions and solutions may be off-base, but whose keenness of mind and command of history is pretty staggering.The ultimate picture that Scruton paints, however, is one that would be absurdly funny if so many people weren't hurt (literally and psychologically) by the unrelievedly nihilistic philosophies and theories perpetuated by the Frankfurt School, existentialists, Marxists, etc. All of the thinkers whose works and beliefs Scruton details have several features in common: they believe in the sanctity of some abstract "worker" or proletariat, despite having little or no daily interaction with their subjects, and they believe that the Left can never be held accountable for the catastrophic gulf between theory and praxis (especially regarding Marxism and Communism), and above all, they believe that people who don't believe what they believe are not merely viewing things from a different perspective, but are wrong, and either need to be ignored or somehow eliminated from the discourse.The works that Scruton engages are many times pretentious, and, once parsed for content, revealed to be empty shell games. Naturally then, when Scruton critiques the works, he himself has to "wade in the mud" so to speak, so sometimes the reading is itself a chore. But it was a necessary public service Scruton performed in this book, and his sense of humor helps leaven what would otherwise be a punishing wade through the mire. And if you're going to college and you're going to accrue debt and a plethora of nihilistic, useless gibberish as well, you owe it to yourself to read this book and inoculate yourself. Or, if you've already been through the ringer, his book will reassure you that no, you are not alone, and that yes, Bertrand Russell was right: "Man is born ignorant, not stupid. He is made stupid through education." Recommended.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    " Žižek the jack-in-the-box and Badiou the magician are now dancing on the stage, and Deleuze grins wide from his coffin."
  

*by C***) on Reviewed in the United States on September 16, 2017*

The title is misleading, because it is the most ad hominem part of the book.  Scruton calls no one here a 'fool,' in fact here he is paying Foucault a compliment:It is as difficult to do justice to the achievements of Foucault as it is to those of Sartre. His imagination and intellectual fluency have generated theories, concepts and insights by the score, and the synthesizing poetry of his style rises above the murky sludge of left-wing writing like an eagle over mud-flats. Moreover, this flamboyant adoption of the higher vision is a large part of Foucault’s appeal. He is unable to encounter opposition without at once rising, under the impulse of his intellectual energy, to the superior ‘theoretical’ perspective, from which opposition is seen in terms of the interests that are advanced by it. Opposition relativized is also opposition discounted. It is not what you say, but that you say it, that awakens Foucault’s interest. ‘D’où parles-tu?’ is his question, and his stance remains beyond the reach of every answer.Considering how much ground is covered, I think it is a compliment to say the book seemed much shorter than 300 pp.  It also seemed up-to-date, although part of it (I'm not sure how much in all) was written in the 1980s.  In part, this book is a lament that every faddish new philosophy coming out of Paris is the same old story.  The 'critique' is always of capitalism, and the failure of socialism never means abandoning 'leftist values.'Quote:... But the attempt to achieve a social order without domination inevitably leads to a new kind of domination, more sinister by far than the one deposed. The seeds of the new structure of power are present in the organization necessary for the violent overthrow of the old, for, as Andrew Marvell said of Cromwell: . . . those arts that did gain A power must it maintain.A study of the logic of ‘revolutionary praxis’ confirms the celebrated observation of Roberto Michels, that an ‘iron law of oligarchy’ constrains all revolutionary parties towards the opposite of their emancipatory goal. It is a century since Michels – himself a radical socialist – expressed those thoughts, and no socialist has ever bothered to answer him, even though history has confirmed his conclusion at every point.If the book gets off to a slow start, and devotes too much space to some 'thinkers' and less to others, it is nonetheless a trenchant, if depressing look at how the academic left insulates itself from reality and logic.  I honestly got a chill toward the end, because I feel the winds of Deleuze et al blowing stronger in the USA today.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    A work of imminent importance
  

*by A***R on Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 27, 2018*

It is disheartening that so few philosophers have dared to challenge the ideas of the New Left head on, calling bullsh** when they see it. Scruton is one of them, and he dares to laugh, and invite others to do so, at the incomprehensible scrabble of words and incoherence of sentences that dominate the writings of thinkers ranging from Lacan and Deleuze to Slavoj Zizek. Scruton shows, not only their logical fallacies and intentional obscurity but more importantly, he shows how these writings can function as magical texts, that can compel their readers to directed action even when they are not understood.

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*Last updated: 2026-02-15*