I don’t see how the New Left faithful can answer all the arguments deployed in these pages. But they are rarely asked to defend any of their views, as their prose has often been taken for granted, at least in the intellectual arena. Conservatives are always asked to justify their conception of life, to defend what already exists. The Left is rarely asked to do so, even though it wants to disrupt many things — including things that are cherished by ordinary people. Scruton has struggled with this paradox his whole life, but it is also what gives his work its exceptional character: he argues when others have left the battlefield or don’t see the point of entering it. To argue, he has to engage with the texts of his opponents, and to recognise where he agrees and disagrees with them. He argues in favour of conservative answers to the claims of the New Left, and not everyone will agree. But at least he has read his opponents, and I don’t think the contrary is true.

One of the conservative answers, for Scruton, is to “rescue the [language of politics] from socialist Newspeak”. A place where this cause is particularly needed today is academia. The New Left culture “now survives largely in its academic redoubts, feeding from the jargon-ridden prose that it amassed in university libraries”, Scruton writes. In my alma mater, an emblematic home of the Parisian New Left where Alain Badiou still teaches, many students now laugh at incomprehensible books that they rarely read.

Still, these authors remain included in the curriculum and their names are still worshipped. Why not act accordingly, and stop studying them? Otherwise, clever undergraduates will keep fleeing the humanities to study something else, and the humanities will be unable to renew and question themselves, and to innovate. This, added to the anti-free-market stand of the New Left, partly explains why the humanities and business have been moving apart for some decades. Business people may be too quick to dismiss academia as useless, but academia has its share of responsibility. For decades, universities have produced thinkers who criticise a legal order and economic prosperity on which they are dependent. The problem is not only that this brand of academia has been biased — bias is sometimes unavoidable, and right-wing academia has its own biases — but that it has shown itself unable to discriminate between serious work and nonsense.

Some people will be shocked by Scruton’s book. They will see it as an ideological work targeting his enemies. But I beg them to open their Habermas, Lacan or Badiou, and to ask two things. Does this text mean something that I could explain to my educated friend? And does it make an honest attempt to understand history or society, and not a resentment-inspired and reality-denying fantasy?

If the answer is no, readers will have grasped Scruton’s point. Unless they really wish “to chew on the glutinous prose of Deleuze, to treat seriously the mad incantations of Žižek, or to believe that there is more to Habermas’s theory of communicative action than his inability to communicate it,” I challenge them to do so.