[2][3][4] According to Scruton, he was motivated to write Thinkers of the New Left by his experiences in Czechoslovakia under the communist regime, where he worked with the Jan Hus Educational Foundation and attempted to smuggle forbidden literature into the country.

[5] The volume is a collection of essays on fourteen authors who Scruton considers as representatives of the New Left, namely E. P. Thompson, Ronald Dworkin, Michel Foucault, R. D. Laing, Raymond Williams, Rudolf Bahro, Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Immanuel Wallerstein, Jürgen Habermas, Perry Anderson, György Lukács, John Kenneth Galbraith and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Scruton argues that during the 1960s and 1970s, the thinkers he discusses helped to create an "oppositional consensus", and that due to its influence "it ceased to be respectable to defend the customs, institutions, and policy of western states".

Crouch also describes Scruton as "paranoid" with a "Manichean conservatism" which equates all criticism of the West with allegiance to the Soviets and compares dry writing styles to Stalinist crimes.

[9] Adams describes Thinkers of the New Left as "a closely argued attack on what Scruton saw as the prevailing fundamentalism of his world, the grip of Marxist and post-Marxist thinking within Britain’s universities.