It includes new chapters covering Lacan, Deleuze and Badiou and some timely thoughts about the historians and social thinkers who led British intellectuals up the garden path during the last decades, including Eric Hobsbawm and Ralph Miliband. Fools Frauds and Firebrands is an update of Thinkers of the New Left published, to widespread outrage, in 1986. In 2015 he published two books, The Disappeared and later in the autumn, Fools Frauds and Firebrands. He taught in both England and America and was a Visiting Professor at Department of Philosophy and Fellow of Blackfriars Hall, Oxford, he was also a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Washington D.C. He was a fellow of the British Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Sir Roger Scruton was a writer and philosopher who has published more than forty books in philosophy, aesthetics and politics. Writing with great clarity, Scruton delivers a devastating critique of modern left-wing thinking.

Can there be any foundation for resistance to the leftist agenda without religious faith? In Fools, Frauds and Firebrands Scruton asks, What does the Left look like today, and how has it evolved? He charts the transfer of grievances, from the working class to women, gays, and immigrants, asks what we can put in the place of radical egalitarianism, and what explains the continued dominance of antinomian attitudes in the intellectual world.

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 Žižek, Ralph Milliband, and Eric Hobsbawm. Beginning with a ruthless analysis of New Leftism and concluding with a critique of the key strands in its thinking, Roger Scruton conducts a reappraisal of such major left-wing thinkers as E.

From one of the leading critics of leftist orientations comes a study of the thinkers who have most influenced the attitudes of the New Left.

Roger scruton thinkers of the new left