Fools, Frauds and Firebrands Quotes

“Intellectuals are naturally attracted by the idea of a planned society, in the belief that they will be in charge of it.”
― Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left

“The contradictory nature of the socialist utopias is one explanation of the violence involved in the attempt to impose them: it takes infinite force to make people do what is impossible".”
― Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left

“Left-wing politics has discarded the revolutionary paradigm advanced by the New Left, in favour of bureaucratic routines and the institutionalization of the welfare culture. The two goals of liberation and social justice remain in place: but they are promoted by legislation, committees and government commissions empowered to root out the sources of discrimination. Liberation and social justice have been bureaucratized.”
― Roger Scruton, Thinkers of the New Left

“Had Heidegger attached his great ego to the cause of international socialism, he would have enjoyed the whitewash granted to Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Hobsbawm and the other apologists for the Gulag.1 But the cause of national socialism could enjoy no such convenient excuse, and the sin was compounded, in Heidegger’s case, by the fact that it was precisely the national, rather than the socialist aspect of the creed that had attracted him.”
― Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left

“The two goals of liberation and social justice are not obviously compatible, any more than were the liberty and equality advocated at the French Revolution. If liberation involves the liberation of individual potential, how do we stop the ambitious, the energetic, the intelligent, the good-looking and the strong from getting ahead, and what should we allow ourselves by way of constraining them?”
― Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left

“When, in the works of Lacan, Deleuze and Althusser, the nonsense machine began to crank out its impenetrable sentences, of which nothing could be understood except that they all had “capitalism” as their target, it looked as though Nothing had at last found its voice.”
― Roger Scruton, Thinkers of the New Left

“So let us replace the word with a true description. People in our societies own things, their labour included, and can trade those things freely with others. They can buy, sell, accumulate, save, share and give. They can enjoy all that their freely exercised labour can secure for them and even, if they choose, do nothing and still survive. You can take away the freedom to buy and sell; you can compel people to work on terms that they would not freely accept; you can confiscate property or forbid this or that form of it. But if those are the alternatives to ‘capitalism’ there is, now, no real alternative save slavery.”
― Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left

“In a moment of doubt about the socialist record Eric Hobsbawm once wrote: ‘If the left have to think more seriously about the new society, that does not make it any the less desirable or necessary or the case against the present one any less compelling.’1 There, in a nutshell, is the sum of the New Left’s commitment. We know nothing of the socialist future, save only that it is both necessary and desirable. Our concern is with the ‘compelling’ case against the present, which leads us to destroy what we lack the knowledge to replace.”
― Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left

“Those who imagined, in 1989, that never again would an intellectual be caught defending the Leninist Party, or advocating the methods of Josef Stalin, had reckoned without the overwhelming power of nonsense. In the urgent need to believe, to find a central mystery that is the true meaning of things and to which one’s life can be dedicated, nonsense is much to be preferred to sense. For it builds a way of life around something that cannot be questioned. No reasoned assault is possible against that which denies the possibility of a reasoned assault.”
― Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left

“If he had stayed in Slovenia, and Slovenia had stayed Communist, Žižek would not have been the nuisance he has since become. Indeed, if there were no greater reason to regret the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, the release of Žižek on to the world of Western scholarship would perhaps already be a sufficient one.”
― Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left

“However, resentment can be transformed into a governing emotion and a social cause, and thereby gain release from the constraints that normally contain it. This happens when resentment loses the specificity of its target, and becomes directed to society as a whole. That, it seems to me, is what happens when left-wing movements take over. In such cases resentment ceases to be a response to another’s unmerited success and becomes instead an existential posture: the posture of the one whom the world has betrayed. Such a person does not seek to negotiate within existing structures, but to gain total power, so as to abolish the structures themselves. He will set himself against all forms of mediation, compromise and debate, and against the legal and moral norms that give a voice to the dissenter and sovereignty to the ordinary person. He will set about destroying the enemy, whom he will conceive in collective terms, as the class, group or race that hitherto controlled the world and which must now in turn be controlled. And all institutions that grant protection to that class or a voice in the political process will be targets for his destructive rage. That posture is, in my view, the core of a serious social disorder.”
― Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left

“Newspeak occurs whenever the primary purpose of language – which is to describe reality – is replaced by the rival purpose of asserting power over it. The fundamental speech-act is only superficially represented by the assertoric grammar. Newspeak sentences sound like assertions, but their underlying logic is that of the spell. They conjure the triumph of words over things, the futility of rational argument, and also the danger of resistance. As a result Newspeak developed its own special syntax, which – while closely related to the syntax deployed in ordinary descriptions – carefully avoids any encounter with reality or any exposure to the logic of rational argument. Françoise Thom has argued this in her brilliant study La langue de bois.5 The purpose of communist Newspeak, in Thom’s ironical words, has been ‘to protect ideology from the malicious attacks of real things’.”
― Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left

“Nonsemes and mathemes stand next to each other in detached and mutually irrelevant jumbles. They lack the crucial valency that ties sentence to sentence in a truth-directed argument or formula to formula in a valid proof, and they can accumulate forever without getting to the point of saying or revealing what they mean.”
― Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left

“modern psychology warns against addiction, in which the ‘dopamine fix’ expels the long-term projects of the heart;”
― Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left

“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.”
― Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left

“It is perhaps easier for an English writer than it is for an Italian to see through that nonsense, and to perceive what it is designed to conceal: the deep structural similarity between communism and fascism, both as theory and as practice, and their common antagonism to parliamentary and constitutional forms of government. Even if we accept the – highly fortuitous – identification of National Socialism and Italian Fascism, to speak of either as the true political opposite of communism is to betray the most superficial understanding of modern history. In truth there is an opposite of all the ‘isms’, and that is negotiated politics, without an ‘ism’ and without a goal other than the peaceful coexistence of rivals. Communism, like fascism, involved the attempt to create a mass popular movement and a state bound together under the rule of a single party, in which there will be total cohesion around a common goal. It involved the elimination of opposition, by whatever means, and the replacement of ordered dispute between parties by clandestine ‘discussion’ within the single ruling elite. It involved taking control – ‘in the name of the people’ – of the means of communication and education, and instilling a principle of command throughout the economy. Both movements regarded law as optional and constitutional constraints as irrelevant – for both were essentially revolutionary, led from above by an ‘iron discipline’. Both aimed to achieve a new kind of social order, unmediated by institutions, displaying an immediate and fraternal cohesiveness. And in pursuit of this ideal association – called a fascio by nineteenth-century Italian socialists – each movement created a form of military government, involving the total mobilization of the entire populace,3 which could no longer do even the most peaceful-seeming things except in a spirit of war, and with an officer in charge. This mobilization was put on comic display, in the great parades and festivals that the two ideologies created for their own glorification.”
― Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left

“The pursuit of abstract social justice goes hand in hand with the view that power struggles and relations of domination express the truth of our social condition, and that the consensual customs, inherited institutions and systems of law that have brought peace to real communities are merely the disguises worn by power. The goal is to seize that power, and to use it to liberate the oppressed, distributing all the assets of society according to the just requirements of the plan.”
― Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left

“In the opinion of almost all the thinkers whom I discuss in what follows, government is the art of seizing and then redistributing the things to which all citizens are supposedly entitled. It is not the expression of a pre-existing social order shaped by our free agreements and our natural disposition to hold ourselves and our neighbours to account. It is the creator and manager of a social order framed according to an idea of ‘social justice’ and imposed on the people by a series of top-down decrees.”
― Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left

“Paul Benacerraf, ‘What Numbers Could Not Be,’ Philosophical Review (1965).”
― Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left

“Pero el reclamo de la “justicia social” encubre una mentalidad igualitaria mucho más persistente, una mentalidad por la que la desigualdad, en cualquier ámbito —en el de la propiedad, el placer, el derecho, la clase social, las oportunidades educativas o cualquier otro que desearíamos para nosotros o para nuestros hijos— es en principio injusta hasta que se demuestre lo contrario. En todo ámbito en el que las posiciones de los individuos sean comparables, el postulado por defecto es la igualdad.”
― Roger Scruton, Pensadores de la nueva izquierda (Pensamiento Actual)

“el comunismo que preconizaba Marx entraña una contradicción: es una situación en la que se disfruta de todas las ventajas que tiene el orden legal, pero no existe la ley; en la que se logran todos los beneficios de la cooperación social, a pesar de que nadie goza de esos derechos de propiedad que, hasta la fecha, han sido los que han hecho posible precisamente la cooperación.”
― Roger Scruton, Pensadores de la nueva izquierda (Pensamiento Actual)

“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.”
― Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left

“Two accusations against our political inheritance have lodged in the brains that I have examined in this book: first, that ‘capitalist’ society is founded on power and domination; second, that ‘capitalism’ means ‘commodification’, the reduction of people to things, and the fetishizing of things as agents.”
― Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left

“To put the point another way: the Marxist theory of history, which explains all historical development as the product of changes in the economic infrastructure, is false.”
― Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left

“A condição para a sociedade é essencialmente de dominação, com pessoas comprometidas umas com as outras por meio de suas ligações, distinguidas pelas rivalidades e pela competição. Não há sociedade que transcenda essas realidades humanas, nem deveríamos desejar uma, pois é dessas coisas que nossas satisfações mundanas são compostas. Mas onde há ligação há poder e onde há rivalidade há necessidade de governo. Como disse Kenneth Minogue certa vez: “o verme da dominação jaz no coração do que é humano, e a conclusão é que a tentativa de extinguir a dominação, como essa ideia é metafisicamente compreendida na ideologia, é uma tentativa de destruir a humanidade”. Nossa preocupação como seres políticos deveria ser não a de abolir os poderes que mantêm a sociedade unida, mas sim a de mitigar seu exercício. Não devemos visar um mundo sem poder, mas um mundo no qual o poder seja consentido e no qual os conflitos sejam resolvidos de acordo com uma concepção partilhada de justiça.”
― Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left

“A maior tarefa da direita, portanto, é resgatar a linguagem da política: recolocar em nosso poder o que foi forçosamente removido pelo jargão. É somente quando reencontramos a linguagem que nos é natural que podemos responder às grandes acusações constantemente feitas a nosso mundo pela esquerda. E é somente ao encontrar essa linguagem que podemos nos mover de dicotomias unidimensionais de esquerda/direita, connosco/contra nós, progressivo/reacionário que tão frequentemente tornam impossível a discussão racional.”
― Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left

“To modern man,’ Hayek argues, ‘the belief that all law governing human action is the product of legislation appears so obvious that the contention that law is older than law-making has almost the character of a paradox. Yet there can be no doubt that law existed for ages before it occurred to man that he could make or alter it.”
― Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left

“The search for a policy to overcome original sin is not a coherent political project.”
― Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left

“Their few empty invocations of equality advance no further than the clichés of the French Revolution, and are soon reissued as mathemes by way of shielding them from argument. But when it comes to real politics they write as though negation is enough. Whether it be the Palestinian intifada, the IRA, the Venezuelan Chavistas, the French sans-papiers, or the Occupy movement – whatever the radical cause, it is the attack on the ‘System’ that matters. The alternative is ‘unnameable in the language of the system’. Didn’t Paul Cohen prove the point?”
― Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left

“While exorting us to judge other cultures in their own terms, he [Said] asks us to judge Western culture from a point of view outside---to set it against alternatives, and to judge it adversely, as ethnocentric and even racist.”
― Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left