Thinkers of the New Left

Thinkers of the New Left is a 1985 book by the English philosopher

Roger Scruton, in which the author analyses and criticizes the New Thinkers of the New Left
Left. Scruton concentrates on 14 authors he considers representatives
of the movement: E. P. Thompson, Ronald Dworkin, Michel
Foucault, R. D. Laing, Raymond Williams, Rudolf Bahro, Antonio
Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Immanuel Wallerstein, Jürgen Habermas,
Perry Anderson, György Lukács, John Kenneth Galbraith and Jean-
Paul Sartre. Thinkers of the New Left proved controversial because of
Scruton's attacks on the British Left, and according to Scruton
himself, its reception damaged his career. Some of the material in
Thinkers of the New Left appeared in reworked form in a 2015 book
titled Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left.

Contents
Summary
Background and publication history Cover
Reception Author Roger Scruton
References Country United Kingdom
Bibliography
Language English
External links Subject New Left
Publisher Longman
Summary Publication 1985
date
Scruton critically evaluates the work of E. P. Thompson, Ronald Media type Print (Hardcover and
Dworkin, Michel Foucault, R. D. Laing, Raymond Williams, Rudolf Paperback)
Bahro, Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Immanuel Wallerstein, Pages
227
Jürgen Habermas, Perry Anderson, György Lukács, John Kenneth
Galbraith and Jean-Paul Sartre. He also provides a general overview ISBN 0-582-90273-8
of left-wing thought and its social and political significance. Scruton
argues that during the 1960s and 1970s, the thinkers he discusses helped to create an "oppositional
consensus", and that due to its influence "it ceased to be respectable to defend the customs, institutions, and
policy of western states". Scruton sees the New Left as the most recent expression of a force that has been
prominent in politics since the beginning of the French Revolution. According to him, left-wing movements
are often led by fanatics, whose rhetoric he compares to that of Maximilien Robespierre.[1]

According to Scruton, while the theories of Karl Marx "have been essentially refuted" by authors such as the
sociologist Max Weber, the economists Eugen Böhm von Bawerk, Ludwig von Mises, and Friedrich Hayek,
and the philosopher Karl Popper, the New Left has failed to respond to Marx's critics with "anything more
persuasive than a sneer", even though the major New Left thinkers depend on the central claims of Marxism.
In Scruton's view, this demonstrates that the New Left does not have "a system of rationally held beliefs", and
is dependent on never questioned assumptions. Scruton praises the philosopher Leszek Kołakowski's Main
Currents of Marxism (1976-1978).[2]
Background and publication history
According to Scruton, he was motivated to write Thinkers of the New Left by his experiences in
Czechoslovakia under the communist regime, where he worked with the Jan Hus Educational Foundation and
attempted to smuggle forbidden literature into the country. Scruton was angered by what he saw as "excuses
for the Gulag" made by scholars such as the historian Eric Hobsbawm.[3]

The book's chapters had previously appeared as separate essays in the British conservative magazine The
Salisbury Review.[4]

Thinkers of the New Left was published by Longman in 1985.[5]

Reception
Thinkers of the New Left was reviewed by John Dunn in The Times Literary Supplement,[6] and Dennis
O'Keeffe in Modern Age.[7] Colin Crouch in The Political Quarterly,[8] argues that Scruton often resorts to
personal attacks on other writers, comparing dry writing styles to Stalinist crimes and calling J.K. Galbraith a
"parasite". Crouch also describes Scruton as "paranoid" with a "Manichean conservatism" which equivocates
all criticism of the West as allegiance to the Soviets.

Looking back on Thinkers of the New Left in 2015, Scruton wrote that because the book was published while
Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister and he, then teaching at a university, was known as a prominent
opponent of the British Left, it was "greeted with derision and outrage", and its publication marked "the
beginning of the end" for his university career and led to attacks on his character and on all of his works,
regardless of whether they dealt with politics. According to Scruton, an academic philosopher wrote to
Longman, the book's publisher, that Longman had been "tarnished by association" with Scruton's work, and
one of Longman's best-selling educational writers threatened to "take his products elsewhere if the book stayed
in print". Scruton writes that copies of Thinkers of the New Left were removed from bookshops as a result.[9]

The journalist Tim Adams writes that underground copies of Thinkers of the New Left were distributed in the
former Czechoslovakia after the book's withdrawal in Britain,[3] while according to Scruton, "samizdat
editions" of the book appeared in both Czech and Polish, and it was subsequently translated into Chinese,
Korean and Portuguese.[9] Adams describes Thinkers of the New Left as "a closely argued attack on what
Scruton saw as the prevailing fundamentalism of his world, the grip of Marxist and post-Marxist thinking
within Britain’s universities."[3] Some of the book's chapters were reworked by Scruton and included in a new
book titled Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left (2015). However, Scruton excluded the
chapters on Laing and Bahro from his new book, believing that the thinkers they are about "have nothing to
say to us today".[9]

Some reviews of Fools, Frauds and Firebrands described the book as a new edition of Thinkers of the New
Left.[10][11][12]

References
1. Scruton 1985, pp. 1–3, 10–176.
2. Scruton 1985, pp. 5–6.
3. Adams 2015.
4. Scruton 1985, p. vii.
5. Scruton 1985, p. iv.
6. Dunn 1986, pp. 347–348.
 7. O'Keeffe 1988, pp. 75–78.
8. Crouch 1986, pp. 453–455.
9. Scruton 2016, pp. vii–viii.
10. Publishers Weekly 2015, p. 45.
11. Poole 2015, pp. vii–viii.
12. Jacobs 2016, pp. 44–46.

Bibliography
Books

Scruton, Roger (1985). Thinkers of the New Left. London: Longman. ISBN 0-582-90273-8.
Scruton, Roger (2016). Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left. London:
Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 978-1-4729-3595-3.

Journals

Crouch, Colin (1986). "Thinkers of the New Left (Book Review)". The Political Quarterly. 57. –
via EBSCO (https://www.ebsco.com)'s Academic Search Complete (subscription required)
Dunn, John (1986). "Restoration and reversal". The Times Literary Supplement (4331). –
via EBSCO (https://www.ebsco.com)'s Academic Search Complete (subscription required)
Jacobs, Alan (2016). "Roger Scruton vs. the New Left". The American Conservative. 15 (2). –
via EBSCO (https://www.ebsco.com)'s Academic Search Complete (subscription required)
O'Keeffe, Dennis (1988). "On the Socialist Fantasy". Modern Age. 32 (1). – via EBSCO (https://
www.ebsco.com)'s Academic Search Complete (subscription required)
"Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left". Publishers Weekly. 262 (31). 2015.
– via EBSCO (https://www.ebsco.com)'s Academic Search Complete (subscription required)

Online articles

Adams, Tim (October 4, 2015). "Roger Scruton: 'Funnily enough, my father looked very like
Jeremy Corbyn' " (https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/oct/04/roger-scruton-my-father-loo
ked-like-jeremy-corbyn-fools-frauds-firebrands-interview). The Guardian. Retrieved 10 October
2015.
Poole, Steven (December 10, 2015). "Fools, Frauds and Firebrands by Roger Scruton review –
a demolition of socialist intellectuals" (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/dec/10/fools-fr
auds-and-firebrands-thinkers-of-the-new-left-roger-scuton-review). The Guardian. Retrieved
9 November 2016.

External links
Fools, Frauds and Firebrands (http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/fools-frauds-and-firebrands-9781
408187333/) at the publisher's website

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