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978-1-890318-47-5
Cloth $25
186 pages, 6" x 9", clothbound, preface, notes, bibliography, index
Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture, An
Scruton, Roger
Received by the British press with equal acclaim and indignation, this book sets out to define and defend high culture against the world of pop, corn, and popcorn. It shows just why culture matters in an age without faith, and gives an extended argument, drawing on philosophy, criticism, and anthro-pology, against the “post-modernist” world-view. Scruton offers a penetrating attack on deconstruction, on Foucault, on Nietzschean self-indulgence, and on the “culture of repudiation” which has infected the modern academy. But his book is not only negative. It is a celebration of the true heroes of modern culture and a call to the higher life.
The American edition of this famous and notorious work has been revised to take account of the controversy which it has inspired, and contains new material specially directed to Americans.
“Scruton is a witty, articulate, artful writer as well as a keen analyst, and before arriving at that recom-mendation, he engagingly critiques the Enlightenment, fantasy as opposed to imagination, Romanticism, aesthetic modernism, the avant-garde and kitsch, the rock-based pop culture he calls “Yoofanasia,” and the intellectual fashions of contemporary academe. For all its seriousness, this is a brilliant and delightful book.” – ALABooklist
“Roger Scruton’s new book is an elegiac survey of this “post-modern” landscape of relativism and unbelief. He stands on Dover beach, like Matthew Arnold before him, his pale face buffeted by the winds of change, listening to the melancholy long withdrawing roar of faith as it is engulfed by the sea of secularism. . . . [Scruton] is a fearless slayer of cant. . . [He delights] in offending liberal orthodoxies.
. . . Isaiah Berlin would not hear his name mentioned in his presence. . . . Scruton should be applauded for his courage to be serious and his desire to be different. It is hard to think . . . who else has the interest in, and flair for, popular communication to make modernity and its discontents their urgent subject.” – Jason Cowley, New Statesmen and Society