The editor of the series, Roger Scruton, writes: "The sixties and the seventies saw a burgeoning of interest in left-wing thinkers, and an attempt to re-draw the intellectual map of modern European and American civilisation, so as to give prominence to the revolutionaries.

Writers as shallow as Fanon or as mendacious as Marcuse were elevated into cultural heroes; ruthless men of action like Mao Zedong and Che Guevara were canonised as enlightened intellectuals; charlatans like Le Corbusier jostled with obscurantists like Foucault and Habermas for the cultural eminence which the believing mass of revolutionary students was all too willing to bestow on them. Thinkers judged to be 'conservative', 'anti-revolutionary' or 'reactionary' were undervalued or dismissed. The modern history of our culture was distorted by the entirely false assumption that its principal representatives have been revolutionaries and modernists.

The time has come to put the record straight and to show that the greatest thinkers of our century have been, almost without exception, anti-modernist, hostile to revolution and anxious to secure continuity and order in the midst of incipient chaos. Even when modernist in their art - like Pound, Joyce or Eliot - they have been anti-modernist in their ideology, and have justified their practice in the name of tradition and continuity rather than in the name of radical freedom and revolutionary change."