Scruton thinks Lacan and Deleuze were both frauds, and that the latter’s popularity has helped reduce the landscape of the modern humanities to “the intellectual equivalent of the aftermath of the Somme” (Really?). (Scruton does allow, archly, that “interesting ideas surface in the great waste-paper basket of Habermas’s prose”.) Another chapter deals with the “nonsense machine” allegedly constructed in Paris by the poststructuralist gang of Louis Althusser, Lacan and Deleuze. It is an art to condemn at length the boringness of a thinker without becoming boring oneself, and Scruton perhaps doesn’t quite manage it in his discussion of Jürgen Habermas, the German intellectual and relentless theorist of the “public sphere”. The rest, Scruton diagnoses mainly as wrong though very clever, or wrong and not very clever, or just shatteringly boring. The only outright “fool” here, in Scruton’s view, is the psychoanalyst Lacan and only the Austro-Hungarian Marxist critic György Lukács is judged downright wicked. Yet the zingier, more knockabout new title promises more fury than the book supplies. Scruton is brilliant at the patient demolition, in sorrowful yet witty tones, of wobbly conceptual edifices. Since then, RD Laing and Rudolf Bahro are out Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, Edward Said, Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek are in. Hence the title change for this new version of Roger Scruton’s critique of rampant intellectual socialism, which was originally published in 1985 as simply Thinkers of the New Left.
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