Bokelskere.no

Roger Scruton er ikke noen vanlig tullebøtte -

så en konsulterte en gjeng anmelderes kommentarer.

Scruton vil ta et bredt oppgjør med en monopolistisk
ikke-tankeretning som forsøker å regjere på overtid.
En retning som tidlig fikk sin analyse i dette verk->

Hvordan verdenshistoriens diktaturer stadig har
operert, burde ikke forbløffe for sterkt pr. idag?

men de mentale brannskader etter en langvarig og
ofte gjentatt megafonert ideologi, kan bli sittende
lenge -

og hildre opp et paradoks som anmelderne nevner:
Ideologien som analyseres og strimles opp, kan være
så utrolig tynn på substans: at en lett heller vil
tro at analytikere som Scruton må ha misforstått
de høyt lærebok-hedrede monopolistiske søylehelgener..

thi dogmefast 'uniformert' ideologi for massene kan
tross alt gi en trygghetsopplevelse:
Kan vel N millioner militærherdede unge ansikter
ta feil, messe kamprop feil - alle i kor?

Likevel, nå til sitatplukket:

"{
Academic philosophy is pretty much worthless.

The classics -- up to Hegel, let's say -- are worth reading,
because they attempt to answer eternal questions.
What's the world really like? What can we know?
What is happiness, and how can we live it?
As time is short and life is busy, "for Dummies" guides
to the greats are valuable if done well --
there's no need to plow through, say, the
'Critique of Pure Reason' if you can get the basics
in a hundred pages or so.

Roger Scruton is one of the best at it, and you really
can't do better than his "Intro" works.

But that's exactly the problem with
'Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands' --
there's so little substance to these clowns
that it quickly becomes nothing more than a discussion
of technique. And even that's tedious --
[eksempler utelatt]

But they're all saying the same thing:
There is no God but Revolution, and, fortunately,
one can appease Him by writing a bunch of nonsense
in the comfort and safety of the faculty lounge.
Scruton tries heroically to find items of philosophical
interest in their writings, but comes up mostly empty.

These "thinkers" are really just apologists --
for Marx's harebrained Labor Theory of Value at best,
for the horrors of the Great Leap Forward at worst.

Who, then, is this book for? (....)

besides, such of their ideas as have percolated down
into the real world are already drearily familiar.
The only difference between a New Left thinker and
a Social Justice Warrior is that the former is better
at squirting polysyllabic jargon to cover over his
blatant self-contradictions and question-begging.
Words like "structure" and "subjectivation" are, as
Scruton shows, just the verbal equivalent of blue hair
and nose rings. ( / )

I picked it up for two reasons: Scruton's style, which
is always a pleasure, and the final section,
an essay called "What's Right?"
Scruton has made the intellectual case for [his]
conservatism at length elsewhere, but this is a valuable
short summary of his main ideas.

}" ( Brian )

"{'
The original publication of Scruton's 'Thinkers of the New Left'
in 1985 reportedly "brought his career as an academic philosopher
to an end" (...)
This is not to say [Scruton] was censored outright
("the people on the left don't 'censor' -- they look with compassion
on your stupidity, take you quietly to the side,
and recommend quietly that you retire for a while").
Rather, so great was the negative outcry from the left that
his publisher eventually surrendered all copies,
removed them from bookshops and relocated them to Scruton's garden.
Call him a sucker for punishment, but Scruton recently updated his
infamous book for republication in late 2015

}"

"{'
For Scruton, it is precisely in the leftist intellectual's
inclination to elevate theory above reality,
to immerse himself so completely in a class-war against the phantasm
of the "bourgeoise" -- that they inevitably blind themselves
to the concrete, tangible reality of the common man in front of them,

and in such a way that, historically, countless acts of violence and
murder have been sanctioned in pursuit of a theoretical, abstract ideal.

(Time and again, Scruton returns to this point of how such intellectuals
have quite willingly and consciously white-washed and carried water for
the most brutal and bloody of regimes,
all in the name of the "revolution").

Moreover, it is the dearth of recognition left-wing theory gives to
the "little platoons" that Scruton abhors --
"all that makes society possible -- law, property, custom, hierarchy,
family, negotiation, government, institutions".
It is these mediating institutions of civil society,
however imperfect and flawed, that exist and stand between
the individual and the "totalizing vision" of the coercive state,

and it is through the free assembly that we come together
in such civil institutions that "politics is softened, and
people are protected from the worst kinds of dictatorship."

(/)
P.S. For a more serious and somewhat less polemical work
of Scrutons, see his 'A Short History of Modern Philosophy:
From Descartes to Wittgenstein' 2001.

}" (Christopher)

Roger Scruton selv

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