The book by Roger Scruton, Madmen, Charlatans, and Troublemakers, is a sweeping critique of contemporary leftist thought. Examining the writers of the New Left who have dominated philosophical public discourse for over fifty years – Hobbsbaum, Thompson, and Miliband; Sartre, Foucault, and Deleuze; Adorno, Lukacs, and Habermas; Gramsci, Badiou, and Zizek – Scruton critiques their ideas, first attempting to explain their work.

In all the above thinkers, Scruton argues, empty rhetoric prevails over careful analysis, and the crude nonsense of respectable logical thought. In this refreshingly sober response to current leftist philosophy, Scruton asks how and why these writers became so popular, and why other voices outside the leftist intellectual tradition have been marginalized.

Professor Roger Scruton is a graduate of Jesus College, Cambridge. He was a professor of Aesthetics at Birkbeck College in London and Boston University. He is currently teaching philosophy at the University of Oxford and is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Ethics and Public Policy in Washington. He has written many books, including some novels, and has also written and composed two operas. He regularly writes articles for the Times, Telegraph, Spectator, and was for many years a wine critic for the New Statesman.

“Delightfully provocative” GQ

“Scruton excels at patiently dismantling, with a mournful yet clever style, unstable conceptual edifices” Guardian

“A masterpiece… [Scruton] neither ridicules nor mistreats the authors he examines, but patiently deconstructs them, first explaining their work in their own terms and then stripping away their distorted assumptions and empty claims” Wall Street Journal