Abstract

The thesis put forward by the British philosopher, Roger Scruton (born 1944) in The Uses of Pessimism seems simple: false hope together with an optimism that is unfounded and unscrupulous are the cause of the most harmful conflicts of our times. Political conflicts, institutional and financial crises, unjustified pedagogic notions, non-consensual town planning, etc., are some of the issues that the author analyses with the help of specific historical examples. Before referring to some of these issues, I shall describe the scheme of reasoning Scruton uses to put this book together. The Uses of Pessimism is divided into twelve chapters, seven of which are devoted to analysing different fallacies. In this work the author analyses arguments he considers to be fallacies. This fact is important as the book’s chapters explicitly enumerate all the fallacies Scruton refers to in the book: The First-Person Future; The Best Case Fallacy; The Born Free Fallacy; The Utopian Fallacy; The Zero Sum Fallacy; The Planning Fallacy; The Moving Spirit Fallacy, and The Aggregation Fallacy.