Review by Choice Review
Scruton is a fellow at the Washington-based Ethics and Public Policy Center, which announces itself as "dedicated to applying the Judeo-Christian moral tradition to critical issues of public policy." In 1985, when most of these essays first appeared in print, Scruton was savaged by the generally leftist faculty at Birkbeck College, London, and that opposition in turn led to his leaving academia. Here Scruton thoroughly and fairly debunks the ostentation, obfuscation, and terrible writing and downright deceitfulness of much of postwar Marxist-inspired philosophy. For Scruton the culprits are mainly from France and Germany--beginning with Sartre and carrying through to Foucault, Habermas, Althusser, Lacan, Deleuze, Gramsci, and Said--and he carries the attack forward to Badiou and Dek. Even Galbraith and Dworkin take a few hits. Scruton writes from the perspective of an old-school conservative. His sympathies are with the virtues of the countryside and historically rooted associations of every sort, from churches and the US Constitution to volunteer fire departments, brass bands, and the local Grange. His personal point of view could be called sentimental and perhaps myopic, but his arguments against his foes are substantial and deep. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. --Richard T. Lee, Trinity College (retired)
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
IN "THE NEW YORK INTELLECTUALS," his seminal 1968 essay looking back on the coterie of writers who burst on the scene in the late 1930s and exercised an outsize influence on the American mind until the rise of the New Left in the early '60s, Irving Howe nicely captured what is distinctive about intellectuals in all times and places. Cultivating a "style of brilliance," the New York writers ranged widely across literature and politics, continually aiming to push beyond the ostensible topics of their essays "toward some encompassing moral or social observation." When it came to style, they took "pleasure in dispute, dialectic, dazzle," prized "freelance dash, peacock strut, daring hypothesis, knockabout synthesis," and "celebrated the idea of the intellectual as antispecialist, or as a writer whose specialty was the lack of a specialty." All of this made their writing and thinking "radically different from the accepted modes of scholarly publishing and middlebrow journalism." For all of their differences in method, scholars and journalists tend to aim in their work for something like impartiality, bracketing their individual idiosyncrasies in favor of a largely selfless pursuit of objectivity through focused, meticulous research. Intellectuals, by contrast, aim to be "specialists in generalizations," as another New York intellectual (the sociologist Daniel Bell) once put it, pronouncing on the world from out of their individual experiences, habits of reading and capacity for judgment. Subjectivity in all of its quirks and eccentricities is the coin of the realm in the Republic of Letters. In the four years since Christopher Hitchens's untimely death at age 62 from complications brought on by esophageal cancer, I've often found myself wondering what he would say about this or that event in the news. What I wouldn't give to read him on Hillary Clinton's email imbroglio, the rise of ISIS or, best of all, the darkly demotic presidential campaign of Donald Trump. Objectivity has nothing to do with it. Hitchens - fair-minded on Hillary? Levelheaded on Islamic terrorism? Impartial on a demagogic bully? You've got to be kidding. What I miss is this man, with this unique sensibility, these foibles and blind spots, this particular mix of literary and cultural references, moral obsessions and undeniable brilliance as a prose stylist. "And Yet . . ." is the closest any of us are likely to come to a resurrection of the man. There is, alas, no Trump in this collection of four dozen articles, book reviews and opinion columns, most of them written for The Atlantic, Vanity Fair and Slate during the final seven years of Hitchens's life. But there is so much else: dazzling, vintage Hitch on Che Guevara, George Orwell (twice), Clive James, Edmund Wilson (who "came as close as anybody has to making the labor of criticism into an art"), Arthur Schlesinger Jr., V. S. Naipaul, Barack ("Cool Cat") Obama, Rosa Luxemburg, Joan Didion, Charles Dickens and G. K. Chesterton. Even better are the essays in which he simply opens his eyes, describes what he sees and ends up hitting on more human truth than you're likely to find in a score of more properly scientific studies. Follow this proudly impious, native Brit through "My Red-State Odyssey" across the South as he describes the scene at a Nascar race and visits a rock formation in southern Virginia that the locals treat as a sign of God's wondrous creation. Or come along for the ride as he looks into the possibility of election fraud in Ohio during the 2004 presidential contest and concludes that far too often Americans are "treated like serfs or extras when they present themselves to exercise their franchise." Most delightful of all may be the riotous three-part essay "On the Limits of Self-Improvement," in which Hitchens endures a full-body makeover, on Vanity Fair's dime, that includes massages, spa treatments, facials, a keratin hair-repair treatment, teeth whitening, hot-wax hair removal (colloquially known as the "sack, back and crack") and a halfhearted effort at getting himself to lose weight, exercise, quit smoking and change his incorrigibly alcoholic ways. The essay tells you, in hilariously sardonic detail, far more than you ever wanted to know about the author's corporal imperfections - and nearly everything you need to know about the strange blend of decadent excess and harsh asceticism that prevails in a certain segment of elite American culture. If Hitchens flourished when he brought his literary sensibility to bear on the kaleidoscopic spectacle of American life, his greatest weakness as a critic and analyst was his tendency at times to take his instinctual hatred of illegitimate authority to absurd lengths. This led him to elevate a seemingly arbitrary list of villains - Henry Kissinger, Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton, Saddam Hussein and God - to the status of History's Greatest Monsters. Thankfully, these personal moral fixations, and the reckless judgment calls they sometimes inspired, make relatively few appearances in this volume. (Yes, I'm talking about his foolish, and never withdrawn, enthusiasm for the disastrous Iraq war, but also the unalloyed, incurious contempt for religion that filled every page of his best-selling "God Is Not Great.") "And Yet . . ." really does give us Hitchens at his best. WHAT LEADS SOME INTELLECTUALS to make so many bad judgments that there's nothing worthwhile to salvage? That, in a way, is the subject of Roger Scruton's "Fools, Frauds and Firebrands." It's an important question, though one that Scruton's book fails to answer in a satisfactory way. Author of more than 30 books and one of Britain's leading conservative intellectuals, Scruton chooses to examine a series of writers through an explicitly and uniformly political lens. Imagine a doctrinaire leftist writing a book on a group of conservative luminaries, then reverse the ideological polarity and that's what we have here: a one-sided polemic against the New Left masquerading as a serious reckoning. The problem is not that the authors Scruton chooses to examine are entirely innocent of the charges he brings against them. All of them have said numerous silly things about politics, economics and history - Scruton does quite a lively job of cataloging them for us - and some of them (Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek, in particular) have an especially impressive track record of fatuous pronouncements. The problem is that Scruton displays such blanket hostility to the assumptions that undergird everything from American liberalism to the most radical Continental theory that he's incapable of writing about anyone situated more than an inch over the center line with even a modicum of sympathy. Does Scruton really think the voluminous, wide-ranging writings of Jürgen Habermas, the most important German social theorist of the past several decades, can be tossed aside so cavalierly? The same might be asked of his facile treatment of Michel Foucault's often fruitfully provocative studies of the place of power and domination in the rise of modern institutions, and of his decision to write off Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze as purveyors of "nonsense in Paris." And really, what could possibly justify placing a nice, moralistic American liberal like Ronald Dworkin between the same covers as the quasi-Stalinist Jean-Paul Sartre and postcolonialist bad boy Edward Said? If you're a Sean Hannity fan who likes to put on airs at a Tea Party rally, Scruton's book will tell you everything you need to know about the thinkers it so confidently dismisses. But those who seek genuine illumination about the characteristic insights and follies of the New Left will need to look elsewhere - for an intellectual guide whose generalizations are less narrowly ideological. DAMON LINKER, a senior correspondent at TheWeek.com, is the author of "The Theocons" and "The Religious Test."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 13, 2015]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Eminent British philosopher and polymath Scruton gives a sharp-edged, provocative critique of leading leftist thinkers since the mid-20th century. In this revision of his earlier polemic Thinkers of the New Left (1985), he examines John Kenneth Galbraith on consumerism, Richard Rorty on pragmatism, Antonio Gramsci on hegemony, Edward Said on colonialism, and Slavoj Zizek on the Other. He also looks at influential French intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan. For the left, according to Scruton, the source of injustice lies not in human nature but in established power and dominant classes. He notes that leftists exalt principles of equality, emancipation, and social justice but claims that they rarely describe actual or corrective models of social order. Through a "relentless campaign of intimidation," he writes, the left tries to make the right unacceptable, yet gives no coherent definition of what constitutes it. If any critics deviate from its premises, "you are not an opponent to be argued with, but a disease to be shunned." Scruton finds relief from contemporary anomie in the rule of law and promotion of liberty. This complex and erudite study is neither an easy read nor a reactionary screed. The overly zippy, alliterative new title does not indicate the depth or seriousness of the analysis. (Dec.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Prickly and terrifically entertaining skewering of the left's darling male thinkersboth European and American, from Sartre to Said. The problem with the socialist "template," English academic and prolific author Scruton (How to be a Conservative, 2014, etc.) asserts with barbed panache in this reworked set of essays first published in 1985, is the rejection of the tender, malleable human element. Scrupulously delving into the work of these left-wing writers (all male, which is a big weakness in this "revision"), the author aims to prove how the twin liberal orders of "liberation" and "social justice" are empty slogans and collapsible newspeak. Where writers like Michel Foucault rail against "structures of domination," Scruton sees only "instruments of civil order," such as common law, property, custom, hierarchy, family, even manners. Marxist intellectuals have had to readjust their utopian visions since the collapse of the Soviet Unionand well before that: since the fall of Stalin and Maoyet continue to see the world in terms of power and struggle. They demonstrate resentment of those who dominate and a determination to repudiate what "we, the inheritors of Western civilization, have received as our historical bequest." Scruton takes on the big leftie ideas with relish: class struggle in British authors Eric Hobsbawm and E.P. Thompson; disdain for consumerism in American writers John Kenneth Galbraith and Ronald Dworkin; existential, anti-bourgeois malaise in French authors Sartre and Foucault (and later "nonsense" in Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, and Gilles Deleuze); and the "culture wars" provoked by Antonio Gramsci and Edward Said, among many others. Refreshingly, Scruton does not mince words, exposing the wooden abstractions and frequent absurdities of these untouchables, especially with regard to the manipulation of language. Caustic, highly recherch, and simply great fun to read for the questing intellectual soul. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
