What are /lit/ thoughts on this book? It's a bit expensive

>>8397578
He was disgraced as a journalist over a decade ago when it was revealed he took pay offs to write positive articles for big industry. Guy is a salty hack.

>>8397578
Whoops I guess I should've posted this on /his/(?). But I guess this board also accepts this kind of discussion...

dunno if this is any help...

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/oct/04/roger-scruton-my-father-looked-like-jeremy-corbyn-fools-frauds-firebrands-interview

>Scruton on… the thinkers of the left

>EJ Hobsbawm
>“Hobsbawm affirmed (in the Daily Worker, 9 November 1956) that he approved of what was happening in Hungary, though with a ‘heavy heart’. Until his death in 2012 Hobsbawm continued to extend his heavy-hearted approval to atrocities. His case illustrates just how far you can go in collaborating with crime, when the crime is committed on the left.”

>Louis Althusser
>“For Althusser Marxist dogma is ‘revealed’ by being concealed. It is the act of concealment, within intellectual structures of impenetrable opacity, which guarantees the truth of every revelation. The axioms of Marxist theory appear in Althusser’s prose like blinding flashes of total darkness, within clouds of grey on grey.”

>Jean-Paul Sartre
>“Sartre changed the language and the agenda of postwar French philosophy, and fired the revolutionary ambitions of students who had come to Paris from the former colonies. One of those students, Pol Pot, was later to return to his native Cambodia and put into practice the ‘totalising’ doctrine that has as its target the ‘otherness’ of the bourgeousie.”

>Slavoj Žižek
>“Žižek’s defence of terror and violence, his call for a new party organised on Leninist principles, his celebration of Mao’s cultural revolution, the thousands of deaths notwithstanding – all of this might have served to discredit Žižek among more moderate leftwing readers, were it not for the fact that it is never possible to be sure he is serious.”

>John Kenneth Galbraith
>“Galbraith’s criticism of the American system predictably earned him a secure position within it. But his appointment as ambassador to India in 1961 [made him] momentarily aware of the truth that a century of Marxist thinking had contrived to deny: that it is not the economic system of a nation that determines its character but its political institutions.”

>Gilles Deleuze
>“He sometimes tries to explain himself to the ordinary reader. But he does so in an endless stream of abstractions from which all reference to concrete reality and the flow of human life has been excised. He does not argue but encloses his key words in fortified boxes, which he locks firmly against all questioning before throwing the key away.”

>>8397611
>Pol Pot just put Sartre's theory in practice
HAHAHA holy shit

>>8397578
It's great.

>>8397611
Some of these put-downs are quite clever but also a bit low. It reads like he's writing for those who just want to see an intelligent man skillfully denigrate leftists rather than refute their ideas. In his Intelligence Squared debate with Terry Eagleton he very sincerely challenged Eagleton's arguments, and still the discussion was amiable and insightful. Anything but petty

>>8397578
I've read it, regrettably. It's an endless rant about some specific parts targeting each author mentioned. The problem is all of them are very prolific, so coming from a status quo rat, he unilaterally cherry picks some parts to attack, giving no defense. Moreover, It's a good strategy exactly because his demography wouldn't have read the relevant works, meaning they are searching for a easy masturbatory read.

>>8397587
Watch the level of ratness:
>In 2002 it emerged that Scruton had been receiving a fee of £54,000 p.a. from Japan Tobacco International (JTI) during a period when he had written about tobacco issues without declaring an interest.[64][65] He wrote articles for The Wall Street Journal in 1998 and 2000, and in 2000 wrote a 65-page pamphlet —"WHO, What, and Why: Trans-national Government, Legitimacy and the World Health Organisation"—for the Institute of Economic Affairs, a British free-market think-tank. The pamphlet criticized the World Health Organization's (WHO) campaign against smoking, arguing that transnational bodies should not seek to influence domestic legislation because they are not answerable to the electorate. He wrote that overall he was against tobacco—his own father died of emphysema after smoking for many years—but that it was an innocent pleasure.

From the 'tobacco' industry, yes, couldn't be worse.

>>8399121
Reread your post

>>8399121
>it's a "leftist doesn't realize he is the academic status quo that he rails against" episode
Another rerun?

>>8399131
It doesn't matter if there's a hegemony in academia, I know that there is. The point is where power/money is, and all the self-reproducing mechanisms that keeps them running, meaning trans-national financial capitalism, the true hegemony, status quo.

>>8397611
I never understood Sartre's espousal of communism. He was the first guy in line to ever buy a Che Guevera t-shirt in bad faith.