ROGER SCRUTON'S POLEMIC AGAINST NEW LEFT THINKERS

Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left (London & New York: Bloomsbury, 2016) (From the book jacket: "In this book Roger Scruton takes apart some of the fashionable and not so fashionable thinkers who are currently taken as authorities on the humanities course, and who have given credence to the view  that there are no respectable positions which are not on the left. . . . In all of them, Roger Scruton argue, empty rhetoric abounds over careful analysis, and blatant nonsense over respectable logic. There is no way in which their influence can be attributed to their arguments, since by and large they have none." Scruton has much worth considering in this polemic against the New Left. However, oftentimes he very much overstates his case, or lets his own empty rhetoric get in the way of careful analysis. For instance, I do not know how anyone interested in late twentieth-century, or early twenty-first-century, American jurisprudence can avoid reading and coming to terms with Ronald Dworkin's body of work. This is so even if one concludes, in one final critical analysis, that he is dead wrong. Moreover, since liberal arts education is systematically being cut and underfunded, and with its enrollments shrinking, it is doubtful that that more than a tiny percentage of undergraduates are exposed to the works of the New Left theorists Scruton skewers as being empty-headed. If anything, the concern should not be their overexposure to New Left thinkers. Rather, the concern should be the limited exposure to critical thinkers of any stripe, and their failure to learn to think and read critically on their on and for themselves. Also, there is a touch of anti-intellectual (which is different from anti-intellectualism) in Fools, Frauds and Firebrands. Scruton writes, "Intellectuals are naturally attracted by the idea of planned society, in the belief that they will be in charge of it." Id. at 12 (italics added). Is not the classical liberal legal scholar Richard A. Epstein an" intellectual"?  Is not the conservative legal scholar and federal judge Richard A. Posner an "intellectual?" Neither one, as far as I can discern, is attracted by the idea of planned society. Moreover, intellectuals though they be, neither "tend[s] to lose sight of the fact that real social discourse is part of day-to-day problem solving and the minute search for agreement." Id. at 12. Scruton must be using the term "intellectual" as a dismissive characterization of New Left thinkers, when the term should apply equally (and, I hope, non-dismissively) to thinkers all along the political spectrum. Again, let me emphasize that Scruton has some interesting and worthwhile points to make. So, read the book, but be careful of potholes of the empty rhetoric.).