The legal theorising of the “brilliant” Ronald Dworkin sees Scruton arguing that it contains a “special pleading for judicial activism, provided that the activists are political liberals”. So the historians Eric Hobsbawm and EP Thompson are praised for “the brilliance of their writing” but marked down for their determination to use “historical understanding as an instrument of social policy” (Though who doesn’t?). This book is at its best, by contrast, when Scruton is engaging with writers whom he evidently respects, however much he disagrees with them. Perhaps they really believed this stuff, in which case they were idiots but not dishonest. But the problem in general with denouncing people as frauds and charlatans is that you might be paying them too much intellectual credit, and so too little moral credit. That is quite something, and of a piece with other gleefully dark put-downs elsewhere (“a morose prowling of the intellect around an inexplicable shrine”). So there is not much to chew on, after Scruton has deftly sketched the historical context and produced this amazing image: “The monsters of unmeaning that loom in this prose attract our attention because they are built from forgotten theories, forged together in weird and ghoulish shapes, like gargoyles made from the debris of a battlefield.”

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.

Fools firebrands and frauds