It is full of drolleries and iconoclastic knockabout, as when Scruton depicts a bewildered reader of the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, waiting hopefully in the corridors of his arid prose “like a petitioner to whom truth has been promised, albeit only abstractly, on a document that is perhaps already out of date”. The manner is not, as he put it, “word-mincing”. His most provocative work in that mode was probably Thinkers of the New Left (1985), a collection of intemperate pieces from the Salisbury Review, later expanded under the characteristic title Fools, Frauds and Firebrands (2015), in which he took on almost every major thinker on the left, from Althusser to Žižek. On the other, he was a brilliant polemicist, the unforgiving critic of what he took to be the charlatans of post-modernity, and a wholly self-conscious controversialist. On the one hand, he was a philosophical writer of tremendous lucidity and expository grace, whose introductions to Kant and Spinoza are exemplary, and whose studies – Sexual Desire (1986) and The Aesthetics of Music (1997) – seemed at once to be masterpieces. It is a polemical dissection and indictment of the perceived destructive aims and tactics of the left.Roger Scruton, who died on Sunday aged 75, was never merely clownish, but his long and immensely productive career as a public intellectual featured a distinction in roles that was not so dissimilar.
“Scruton’s book is not the dispassionate examination and measured assessment of philosophical arguments typical of analytic philosophers. This he does with rhetorical vigor and flair, and though he often paints with the broadest of brushes and does not always make the distinctions perfect fairness would call for, his critique is a powerful one indeed.” Alan Jacobs, The American Conservative “…he largely sets aside constructive philosophical work in order to dismantle the dismantlers. "Scruton's stylish writing and his knowledge and passion for his subject make this an entertaining read." Patricia Duffaud The Book Bag Yet the zingier, more knockabout new title promises more fury than the book supplies." Steven Poole - The Guardian "Scruton is brilliant at the patient demolition, in sorrowful yet witty tones, of wobbly conceptual edifices. "“He neither ridicules nor abuses the writers he considers he patiently deconstructs them, first explaining their work in terms they themselves would recognise and then laying bare their warped assumptions and empty pretentions." Barton Swaim - Wall Street Journal "Unlike many conservatives, Scruton isn’t merely a debunker, but offers a way out of Marxism." Ron Capshaw - National Review "Outstanding and very necessary" Laetitia Strauch - Standpoint
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