Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left

Scruton's central claim is that the New Left seized the humanities not by winning arguments but by manipulating language and intimidating dissent. He rejects the notion that leftist intellectuals engage in genuine debate: instead, they deploy what he calls 'Newspeak,' a vocabulary of moral vanity that labels opponents as diseases rather than interlocutors. The book also rejects the idea that these thinkers are merely wrong—Scruton argues many are frauds, deliberately obscuring empty ideas with impenetrable prose, while systematically ignoring the atrocities committed by communist regimes they defended or excused.

Fools, Frauds and Firebrands is a revision and expansion of Scruton's 1985 book Thinkers of the New Left. The original provoked a torrent of hostility: left-wing academics threatened the publisher with a boycott, and Scruton says the affair marked 'the beginning of the end' for his university career. The 2015 version drops some figures no longer relevant and adds chapters on Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek, Edward Said, and Alain Badiou, while retaining the core argument that the left's 'long march through the institutions' transformed academia into a bastion of ideological conformity.

Scruton identifies language manipulation as the left's central method, drawing on Orwell's concept of 'Newspeak.' He argues that terms like 'social justice,' 'emancipation,' and 'equality' function not as descriptions of achievable goals but as moral weapons—words that condemn opponents without requiring evidence. The left, he writes, 'determines the language of the debate,' describing itself as working for mankind, so that opponents become 'weeds choking up the garden' rather than legitimate adversaries. This rhetorical strategy, he contends, has allowed leftist thinking to seize the academy while avoiding accountability for the failures of actually existing socialism.

Scruton examines a wide range: Sartre, Foucault, Lacan, Althusser, Lukács, Adorno, Gramsci, Habermas, Deleuze, Hobsbawm, E.P. Thompson, Dworkin, Badiou, Rorty, Said, Galbraith, and Žižek. He is not uniformly dismissive. The Guardian review notes that he praises Sartre as a 'gifted writer,' describes Foucault's style as rising 'like an eagle over mud-flats,' and admits Hobsbawm's historical synthesis is 'remarkable.' Only Lacan is labeled an outright 'fool,' and only Lukács 'downright wicked.' The rest are 'wrong though very clever, or wrong and not very clever, or just shatteringly boring.'

The most persistent criticism is that Scruton adopts the very rhetorical style he condemns. The Guardian's reviewer observed that 'the book adopts the abusive and paranoid style it decries in its leftwing opponents,' stigmatizing enemies in the language of mental illness—Žižek emits 'mad incantations,' Althusser writes 'like a lunatic trapped in an imaginary cage,' Lacan is 'a crazy charlatan.' Scruton also alleges a vast left-wing conspiracy to silence conservatives, citing the New York Review of Books as one arm—an ironic claim given that Bloomsbury, a major publisher, released the book.

The book applies Scruton's core conservative commitments to intellectual history. His defense of tradition, inherited institutions, and 'little platoons' grounds his hostility to what he sees as the left's utopian desire to demolish existing social orders. He argues that leftist intellectuals share a 'disgust of the bourgeoisie' that is ultimately a rejection of the Western civilization that produced them. In contrast, Scruton locates hope in 'the rule of law and promotion of liberty'—not revolutionary transformation but the patient maintenance of institutions that protect citizens from both state power and ideological zealotry.