The Socialism Of Fools

In Socialism of Fools, Michele Battini focuses on the critical moment during the Enlightenment in which anti-Jewish stereotypes morphed into a sophisticated, modern social anti-Semitism. He recovers the potent anti-Jewish, anticapitalist propaganda that cemented the idea of a Jewish conspiracy in the European mind and connects it to the atrocities that characterized the Jewish experience in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Beginning in the eighteenth century, counter-Enlightenment intellectuals and intransigent Catholic writers singled out Jews for conspiring to exploit self-sustaining markets and the liberal state. These ideas spread among socialist and labor movements in the nineteenth century and intensified during the Long Depression of the 1870s. Anti-Jewish anticapitalism then migrated to the Habsburg Empire with the Christian Social Party; to Germany with the Anti-Semitic Leagues; to France with the nationalist movements; and to Italy, where Revolutionary Syndicalists made anti-Jewish anticapitalism the basis of an alliance with the nationalists. Exemplified best in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the infamous document that "leaked" Jewish plans to conquer the world, the Jewish-conspiracy myth inverts reality and creates a perverse relationship to historical and judicial truth. Isolating the intellectual roots of this phenomenon and its contemporary resonances, Battini shows us why, so many decades after the Holocaust, Jewish people continue to be a powerful political target.

This study examines fully the role that the historic European left has played in developing and espousing anti-Semitic views.

This study examines fully the role that the historic European left has played in developing and espousing anti-Semitic views.

There was once a general consensus on the Left that anti-Semitism, derided as 'the socialism of fools', had no place in the Labour movement. No longer. Having led his party to its worst defeat since 1935, Jeremy Corbyn's humiliation was compounded when in October 2020, Labour was found by the Equality and Human Rights Commission to have been in breach of the Equality Act of 2010 on three separate counts of unlawful anti-Semitic acts while he was Party Leader. Corbyn himself was criticised by the Commission for protecting those committing such acts, and had the party whip withdrawn for rejecting its findings. In 2022, Corbyn publicly opposed NATO providing Ukraine with the military means to resist Putin's invasion, and after its massacre of more than 1,000 Jewish civilians on October 7, 2003, refused to condemn Hamas as a terrorist organisation. This book places the Corbyn affair in the context of a general crisis of the global Left, one that has been fueled by a toxic mix of an obsessive anti-Zionism, Islamophilia, political correctness, a loathing of western civilisation, 'critical race theory' and an abandonment of its historical roots in the working class.

There was once a general consensus on the Left that anti-Semitism, derided as 'the socialism of fools', had no place in the Labour movement. No longer. Having led his party to its worst defeat since 1935, Jeremy Corbyn's humiliation was compounded when in October 2020, Labour was found by the Equality and Human Rights Commission to have been in breach of the Equality Act of 2010 on three separate counts of unlawful anti-Semitic acts while he was Party Leader. Corbyn himself was criticised by the Commission for protecting those committing such acts, and had the party whip withdrawn for rejecting its findings. In 2022, Corbyn publicly opposed NATO providing Ukraine with the military means to resist Putin's invasion. This book places the Corbyn affair in the context of a general crisis of the global Left, one that has been fuelled by a toxic mix of an obsessive anti-Zionism, Islamophilia, political correctness, a loathing of western civilisation, 'critical race theory' and an abandonment of its historical roots in the working class.

Interest in Leo Strauss is greater now than at any time since his death, mostly because of the purported link between his thought and the political movement known as neoconservatism. Steven B. Smith, though, surprisingly depicts Strauss not as the high priest of neoconservatism but as a friend of liberal democracy—perhaps the best defender democracy has ever had. Moreover, in Reading Leo Strauss, Smith shows that Strauss’s defense of liberal democracy was closely connected to his skepticism of both the extreme Left and extreme Right. Smith asserts that this philosophical skepticism defined Strauss’s thought. It was as a skeptic, Smith argues, that Strauss considered the seemingly irreconcilable conflict between reason and revelation—a conflict Strauss dubbed the “theologico-political problem.” Calling this problem “the theme of my investigations,” Strauss asked the same fundamental question throughout his life: what is the relation of the political order to revelation in general and Judaism in particular? Smith organizes his book with this question, first addressing Strauss’s views on religion and then examining his thought on philosophical and political issues. In his investigation of these philosophical and political issues, Smith assesses Strauss’s attempt to direct the teaching of political science away from the examination of mass behavior and interest group politics and toward the study of the philosophical principles on which politics are based. With his provocative, lucid essays, Smith goes a long way toward establishing a distinctive form of Straussian liberalism.