★★★★★
Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left by Roger Scruton
How did orthodox Marxism-Leninism develop into today’s Social Justice Warrior activism? On the surface the ideology of Communist party cadres sounds miles apart from campus activists of the 2010s. “Fools, Frauds and Firebrands” is critical history of leftish political philosophy from the 1930s to the 1990s. Ever since he was stuck as a studying in Paris in 1968, feeling disgust for the hatefulness and idolisation of tyranny of the revolutionary movement, Sir Roger Scruton has read tremendous amount of leftish political philosophy in French, German and English.
In “Fools, Frauds and Firebrands” Scruton tries to synthesise the major thinkers of the left into a continuous genealogy of on century of illiberal leftish thought.
— “Class is an attractive idea for left-wing historians because it denotes a thing that divides us. By seeing society in class terms we are programmed to find antagonism at the heart of all the institutions through which people have attempted to limit it. Nation, law, faith, tradition, sovereignty – these ideas by contrast denote things that unite us.”
Some take-downs
On Jean-Paul Sartre
“Sartre’s anti-bourgeois rhetoric changed the language and the agenda of post-war French philosophy, and fired the revolutionary ambitions of students who had come to Paris from the former colonies. One of those students was later to return to his native Cambodia and put into practice the ‘totalizing’ doctrine that has as its targets the ‘seriality’ and ‘otherness’ of the bourgeois class. And in the purifying rage of Pol Pot it is not unreasonable to see the contempt for the ordinary and the actual that is expressed in almost every line of Sartre’s demonic prose.”
On Jürgen Habermas
“In Habermas’s volumes you will seldom encounter a real dilemma, an actual institution, a record of some felt community of purpose. All is as in the paragraph just quoted: systems, subcultures, motivations, functions, legitimations, ideologies, forces – abstract entities described in a pan-dynamic Newspeak that removes real human beings from the equation.”
On Jacques Lacan
“The Parisian nonsense machine was used to mount a ballistic assault on the bourgeois culture, throwing dense blocks of impenetrable Newspeak over the battlements into the public square of the besieged city. The effect was to destroy the conversation on which civil society depends”
On Edward Saïd
“the principal reason for Said’s popularity in our universities is that he provided ammunition against the West.”
On György Lukács
“The root fallacy of Marxism, the belief in a real ‘essence’ of which our social life is only an ‘appearance’, had colonized Lukács’s brain, and taken the form of an immovable religion. From this moment the surrounding world lost all claim over Lukács’s conscience. All was to be swept away in the refining fire of revolution.”
On John Kenneth Galbraith
“The quotation illustrates Galbraith’s principal intellectual device. A psychological observation, expressed in ironical tones, is used to support an economic theory of immense and far-reaching consequences.”
On Antonio Gramsci
“Gramsci thus initiated a standard communist evasion: a vast popular movement that is anti-communist is never a movement of the ‘masses’, whereas a coup d’état by communist intellectuals is always supported by the ‘masses’, whatever the strength and nature of the opposition, and however thin on the ground the ‘masses’ turn out to be.”
303 pages, Kindle Edition Published 2015 by Bloomsbury Continuum ISBN 1408187353 ASIN B0161JXD7K Language English Bookshelves: e-books, language, philosophy, politics
Highlights
The left-wing position was already clearly defined at the time when the distinction between left and right was invented. Leftists believe, with the Jacobins of the French Revolution, that the goods of this world are unjustly distributed, and that the fault lies not in human nature but in usurpations practised by a dominant class. They define themselves in opposition to established power, the champions of a new order that will rectify the ancient grievance of the oppressed.
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Liberation of the victim is a restless cause, since new victims always appear over the horizon as the last ones escape into the void. The liberation of women from male oppression, of animals from human abuse, of homosexuals and transsexuals from ‘homophobia’, even of Muslims from ‘Islamophobia’ – all these have been absorbed into the more recent leftist agendas, to be enshrined in laws and committees overseen by a censorious officialdom. Gradually the old norms of social order have been marginalized, or even penalized as violations of ‘human rights’.
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But behind the goal of ‘social justice’ there marches another and more dogged egalitarian mentality, which believes that inequality in whatever sphere – property, leisure, legal privilege, social rank, educational opportunities, or whatever else we might wish for ourselves and our children – is unjust until proven otherwise. In every sphere in which the social position of individuals might be compared, equality is the default position.
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Intellectuals are naturally attracted by the idea of a planned society, in the belief that they will be in charge of it.
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His four-volume history of the emergence of the modern world – The Age of Revolution 1789–1848, The Age of Capital 1848–1875, The Age of Empire, 1875–1914, and The Age of Extremes, 1914–1991 – is a remarkable work of synthesis, seriously misleading only in the fourth volume, where the attempt to whitewash the communist experiment and to lay the blame for all ills at the door of ‘capitalism’ has an aspect that is partly sinister, partly quaint. Hobsbawm’s account of the Industrial Revolution and its imperial outreach – Industry and Empire: From 1750 to the Present Day – has won a well-deserved place as a school textbook on the subject, reprinted almost every year since its first publication in 1968.
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Where others might study law, religion, art and family life, Marxists concentrate on the ‘material’ realities, which means the production of food, houses, machinery, furniture and means of transport. If you are sufficiently selective, you can give the impression that the production of material goods is the real motor of social change, since without them, after all, no other goods can exist.
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Marxist history means rewriting history with class at the top of the agenda. And it involves demonizing the upper class and romanticizing the lower.
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Class is an attractive idea for left-wing historians because it denotes a thing that divides us. By seeing society in class terms we are programmed to find antagonism at the heart of all the institutions through which people have attempted to limit it. Nation, law, faith, tradition, sovereignty – these ideas by contrast denote things that unite us.
— location: 807 ^ref-11182
The quotation illustrates Galbraith’s principal intellectual device. A psychological observation, expressed in ironical tones, is used to support an economic theory of immense and far-reaching consequences.
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This vision has provided the theoretical basis for one of the most important tenets of the New Left in America: the theory that the ‘capitalist’ state is as much a system of control as the communist state, since it is a servant of the corporations, and the necessary completion of a planning process that originates in the technostructure of the oligopolic firm.
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The distinction between law and legislation has been tacitly recognized in many European languages – diritto versus legge, droit versus loi, Recht versus Gesetz, právo versus zákon and so on. Interestingly enough, it has no such clear marker in English, even though English law is nearly unique in preserving common-law procedure. The legislator sees law as a human artefact, created for a purpose, and may endeavour to use law not merely to rectify injustices but also to bring about a new social order, in conformity with some ‘political morality’
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Patriotism, Zola argued, has nothing to do with race, but everything to do with citizenship. Zola’s article brought to a head the conflict concerning the relation between Catholic orthodoxy and the status of the Jewish citizen.
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Writers after the war divided into the innocent and the guilty, the innocent being often self-styled, and including many who had hastily cobbled together a fiction of membership in the Resistance.
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Sartre was never a member of the Communist Party, believing neither in parties nor in any other kind of institution. But Les Temps modernes, under his editorship, was unswerving in its support for communist campaigns. Moreover, his own political denunciations (typified by that directed against his former friend and co-editor Albert Camus in Les Temps modernes) were brutally Stalinist, just as his vision of the modern world was utopian and myopic: facts that approximate him so closely to the spirit of the French Communist Party as to make his self-proclaimed distance from it little more than a gesture.
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Raymond Aron – that Marxism fills the gap left vacant by religion.
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Sartre’s anti-bourgeois rhetoric changed the language and the agenda of post-war French philosophy, and fired the revolutionary ambitions of students who had come to Paris from the former colonies. One of those students was later to return to his native Cambodia and put into practice the ‘totalizing’ doctrine that has as its targets the ‘seriality’ and ‘otherness’ of the bourgeois class. And in the purifying rage of Pol Pot it is not unreasonable to see the contempt for the ordinary and the actual that is expressed in almost every line of Sartre’s demonic prose.
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The theory of the episteme is a rerun of the Marxist theory of ideology. It offers to characterize each form of thought, each system of concepts, images and narratives, in terms of its function of embedding and maintaining the power structure on which the social order depends.
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Each successive age finds a similar ‘truth’ with which to confront those who defy its conventions. And each age defines sanity in the way required by the prevailing system of power: sanity is the form of behaviour that respects the established structures of domination. But, Foucault suggests, the stock of the ‘truths’ with which madness can be confined is now exhausted.
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It is somewhat less surprising to be told that criminal justice operates in the ‘production of truth’, and that it is one of those systems of ‘knowledge’ which, for Foucault, exist because they express and legitimize power. Nor is it surprising to find that punishment undergoes the same transition as medicine, from a system of symbolism to a system of surveillance.
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As I have argued, we must separate Foucault’s analysis of the workings of power from the facile relativism that opens such easy paths to theory.
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When there is no third party present at the trial of those accused, no one with the duty to sift the evidence, no one to mediate between the parties or to look impartially on the facts, then ‘justice’ becomes a ‘life and death’ struggle, in which one side has all the weapons. Such was observed at the Moscow Show Trials, as well as at the Revolutionary Tribunals of the French Revolution. As a historian Foucault must have known this. Yet he willingly subscribed to a form of ‘proletarian justice’ that removes all defence from the accused.
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After the war, in what was then West Germany, the universities were in crisis, and the question what to teach, and how, was the urgent preoccupation of all serious academics. It was partly through the universities that Nazism had instilled its poison into the minds of the young, and it was understandable that all those who had gained or retained their academic positions during the Hitler years should be regarded with suspicion. In some cases the suspicion was justified, and the notorious case of Martin Heidegger reminds us that even a great philosopher can throw in his lot, when the moment comes, with the forces of destruction.
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Curriculum, syllabus, literature – all were fumigated, and the tawdry idols of national socialism cast down from their pedestals into the gutter from whence they came. In their place came a new idol – the Marxist humanism of the pre-war Frankfurt School. The idol was crudely wrought at first, from materials that had been hastily shipped to America during the pre-war turmoil. But gradually the process of manufacture was refined, and along with the post-war boom in German industry came the new Frankfurt intellectual, smooth, polished and produced like the BMW in many complementary varieties, each technically perfect and each with a performance chart that outstripped those of the French and British rivals.
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The root fallacy of Marxism, the belief in a real ‘essence’ of which our social life is only an ‘appearance’, had colonized Lukács’s brain, and taken the form of an immovable religion. From this moment the surrounding world lost all claim over Lukács’s conscience. All was to be swept away in the refining fire of revolution.
— location: 2843 ^ref-35960
Every modern thinker who disagrees with some critical tenet of Marxism is denounced as ‘bourgeois’, while every true Marxist writer is praised as ‘proletarian’. These labels are in fact not the names of social classes at all, but expletives. Because the label ‘bourgeois’ concentrates into itself every human evil, and the label ‘proletarian’ all human good, Lukács imagines that he has provided himself with the perfect instrument of censorship. Furthermore, he makes it clear that the proletariat, which speaks historically through the mouths of bourgeois intellectuals like Marx and Engels, speaks in the present only through the Communist Party, which is its established church. Only in the Party, with its essentially organized structure, is the unity between theory and practice accomplished. Hence: ‘it is the great accomplishment of Russian Bolshevism to incorporate, for the first time since the Paris Commune, the consciousness of the proletariat and its self-knowledge in terms of world history’.
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That description might be equally applied to Adorno, who took over Lukács’s analysis of capitalism, and applied it in the wholly new context of the critique of popular culture.
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On this basis Horkheimer founded what he called ‘critical theory’, which was to be the systematic critique of capitalist culture, by relating it to the ‘bourgeois relations of production’ on which it depends. Reason, he argues, is corrupted by the capitalist order and loses its natural focus in human life.
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By constantly notching up the critique of American capitalism and its culture, and making only muted or dismissive references to the real nightmare of communism, those thinkers showed their profound indifference to human suffering and the unserious nature of their prescriptions.
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Emancipation, Habermas suggests, is first of all emancipation of language – what he later refers to as the ‘ideal speech situation’. While the suggestion sounds somewhat paradoxical, coming from a writer whose language is imprisoned by meaningless jargon,
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How do we arrive at the herrschaftsfrei social choice? The only cogent answer that has ever been given to that question is precisely the one from which Habermas flees: namely the truly free and autonomous choice is the one that respects the sovereignty of the individual, by granting him the right to dispose of his will, his labour and his property as his own. It is the answer given by the Enlightenment, enshrined in the American Constitution, and embellished by the Austrian theory of the market, and the tradition of Western democracy. In other words it is the answer that Marxist humanism had dismissed from the outset as ‘bourgeois ideology’, and which Habermas himself is constantly and dismissively referring to, in side-swipes that never come clean as to what they are really swiping at.
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In Habermas’s volumes you will seldom encounter a real dilemma, an actual institution, a record of some felt community of purpose. All is as in the paragraph just quoted: systems, subcultures, motivations, functions, legitimations, ideologies, forces – abstract entities described in a pan-dynamic Newspeak that removes real human beings from the equation.
— location: 3560 ^ref-5826
To his credit he grew away from that stultifying agenda, advocating dialogue, negotiation and sympathy in the place of the old Marxist ‘struggle’. However, the new agenda had the form of a political programme without the content.
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Althusser was therefore enthusiastically endorsed by his Parisian contemporaries, who were, at the time, assembling a nonsense machine that could eliminate the possibility of rational argument, and which could also rephrase every question, however scholarly, as a question of politics. Thanks to the nonsense machine you could plunge into the work of ‘intellectual production’, and believe that you were already part of the revolution.
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In his Cours de linguistique générale (published posthumously in 1916) the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure introduced two ideas that were to be used, abused and jargonized throughout the 1960s and 70s: the idea of language as a system of ‘differences’, and the idea that there is, or could be, a ‘general science of signs’. The meaning of a sign, Saussure argued, attaches to it only in the context of the other signs that might replace it in a sentence. The meaning of ‘hot’ must be understood in terms of the difference between ‘hot’ and ‘cold’. Some went further, arguing that language is nothing but a system of differences, each sign owing its meaning to the signs that it excludes. This was taken by Saussure as authority for the view that language has no ‘positive terms’, but is an endless stream of negations, whose meaning lies in what is not said, and what cannot be said (for to say it is merely to defer the meaning to another hidden negative).
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The Parisian nonsense machine was used to mount a ballistic assault on the bourgeois culture, throwing dense blocks of impenetrable Newspeak over the battlements into the public square of the besieged city. The effect was to destroy the conversation on which civil society depends.
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but Gramsci possessed an advantage that Trotsky could not claim: he was not only dead, but dead in the struggle against fascism.
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the same could be said of fascism; but it has been an important leftist strategy, and a major component of Soviet post-war propaganda, to contrast a purely theoretical communism with ‘actually existing’ fascism, in other words to contrast a promised heaven with a real hell.
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In The Modern Prince and other writings from his prison years7 he moved on from Leninist sloganizing and devoted himself to the task of reconciling the Marxist theory of history and society with a philosophy of political action.
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Thus to the realist who asks how, in this society of the future, conflicts are to be accommodated or resolved, Gramsci has no reply. The communist shares with the fascist an overriding contempt for opposition. The purpose of politics is not to live with opposition, but to remove it – to achieve the condition in which opposition no longer exists
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Revolution, according to Gramsci, is not an ineluctable force that sweeps us away, but an action, undertaken by heroic individuals. Moreover it is an action that can be pursued without dirtying your hands in the factory. You can calmly proceed to whatever comfortable office has been provided, there to work for the downfall of the bourgeois hegemony, while enjoying its fruits. Such a philosophy is extremely useful to the intellectual – whose views and patience would be severely challenged outside the university – and it is the natural philosophy of student revolution.
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Gramsci thus initiated a standard communist evasion: a vast popular movement that is anti-communist is never a movement of the ‘masses’, whereas a coup d’état by communist intellectuals is always supported by the ‘masses’, whatever the strength and nature of the opposition, and however thin on the ground the ‘masses’ turn out to be.
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Gramsci’s idea that revolutionary praxis involves seizing the culture.
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The intellectual labour of the New Left has been not to prove the Marxist theory but to describe the world as though it were true, so that every existing fact seems to resonate with the distant voice of the oppressed.
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The very quality of his prose in this ideological confrontation shows the extent to which Marxist Newspeak had become, for him, not an instrument of thought but a defence against it.
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The crucial part of that bloc, the revolutionary working class, went AWOL somewhere around 1970. The culture wars thereafter shifted to America, a country that has never had a revolutionary proletariat, and where there is only the culture to capture.
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Said illustrated his thesis with highly selective quotations, concerning a very narrow range of East–West encounters. And while pouring as much scorn and venom as he could on Western portrayals of the Orient, he did not trouble himself to examine any Eastern portrayals of the Occident, or to make any comparative judgements whatsoever, when it came to assessing who had been unfair to whom.
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the principal reason for Said’s popularity in our universities is that he provided ammunition against the West.
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the culture wars have ended in America in a near-universal victory for the left. Many of those appointed as the guardians of Western culture will seize on any argument, however flawed, and any scholarship, however phony, in order to denigrate their cultural inheritance. We have entered a period of cultural suicide, comparable to that undergone by Islam after the ossification of the Ottoman Empire. Encouraged by Said, students learn first to despise, and eventually to forget, the outlook that led those noble orientalists to undertake a task that only someone steeped in Western culture would dream of – the task of rescuing a culture other than their own.
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Hence the assault on the curriculum, and the attempt to impose a standard of ‘political correctness’ – which means, in effect, a standard of non-exclusion and non-judgement – is also designed to authorize a vehement kind of judgement, against all those authorities that question the orthodoxy on the left.
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It is of course entirely possible that I have failed to understand what Badiou is getting at, in his crypto-mathematical works. But something in the style suggests to me that there is less to them than meets the eye. The mathemes are not there to offer the kind of indubitable support that only mathematics can offer, but to create the impression of rigour in its absence.
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As with Hobsbawm, Sartre, Lukács and Adorno, crime for Badiou isn’t crime, if the goal is utopia.
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We should not be surprised, therefore, when Žižek writes that ‘the thin difference between the Stalinist gulag and the Nazi annihilation camp was also, at that moment, the difference between civilization and barbarism
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But the nonsense machine was wheeled on to obliterate the shoots of rational argument, to cover everything in a mist of uncertainty, and to revive the idea – already present and poisonous in Lukács – that the real revolution has yet to come, and that it will be a revolution in thought, an inner liberation, against which rational argument (which is mere ‘bourgeois ideology’) has no defence. In this way the reign of nonsense buried the question of revolution so deeply beneath the possibility of rational enquiry that it could no longer be directly stated.
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All that, you might think, puts an enormous onus on left-wing thinkers to define their alternative. But looking back across the bleak landscape that I have travelled in this book I witness only negatives. Occasional lip service is paid to a future state of ‘emancipation’, ‘equality’ or ‘social justice’. But those terms are seldom lifted out of the realm of abstractions, or subjected to serious examination. They are not, as a rule, used to describe an imagined social order that their advocates are prepared to justify. Instead they are given a purely negative application. They are used to condemn every mediating institution, every imperfect association, every flawed attempt that human beings might have made, to live together without violence and with due respect for law. It is as though the abstract ideal has been chosen precisely so that nothing actual could embody it.
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A blind faith drags radical leftists from ‘struggle’ to ‘struggle’, reassuring them that everything done in the name of equality is well done and that all destruction of existing power will lead towards the goal. They desire to leap from the tainted world that surrounds them into the pure but unknowable realm of total emancipation.
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The greatest task on the right, therefore, is to rescue the language of politics: to put within our grasp what has been forcibly removed from it by jargon.
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‘Capitalism’ is in most of its uses a term of Newspeak. It suggests a comprehensive theory to explain our society, and a strategy to replace it. But there is no such theory, and no such strategy. We know this from a very simple observation, namely that, after all social transformations, however fundamental, after all adaptations, achieved with whatever effort and at whatever cost, the term ‘capitalism’ still surfaces as a description of the result. This is even true of the state that resulted from the communist revolution in Russia, described as ‘state capitalism’ by thinkers of the Frankfurt school. The growth of the welfare state, the expansion of home-ownership, the increased social mobility, the evolution of cooperatives, self-employment and shareholding – none of the ways in which society has moved on since Marx or adapted to the needs of its members has loosened the grip of this potent word, which, because it applies to everything, says nothing.
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The old socialist complaint creeps in behind the Newspeak: where there is private property there is also power – the power of the one who owns over the one who needs, of group over group, of class over class. Always in the wake of the attack on ‘capitalism’ comes the yearning for a ‘powerless’ world. But this yearning, which finds its most eloquent expression in the writings of Foucault, is incoherent. The condition of society is essentially one of domination, in which people are bound to each other by their attachments, and distinguished by rivalries and competition. There is no society that transcends those human realities, nor should we wish for one, since it is from those things that our worldly satisfactions are composed. But where there is attachment there is power; and where there is rivalry there is the need for government. As Kenneth Minogue once put it: ‘the worm of domination lies at the heart of what it is to be human, and the conclusion faces us that the attempt to overthrow domination, as that idea is metaphysically understood in ideology, is the attempt to destroy humanity’.3 Our concern as political beings should be, not to abolish the powers that bind society together, but to mitigate their exercise. We should not aim for a world without power, but for a world where power is consented to, and where conflicts are resolved according to a shared conception of justice.
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A government without opposition is without the means to correct its own mistakes or even to notice that it is making them
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