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A Political Philosophy: Arguments for Conservatism Paperback – April 23, 2019

by Roger Scruton (Author)

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Roger Scruton's classic work on conservatism, reissued for a new political moment.

Over the past twenty years, Roger Scruton has been developing a conservative view of human beings, society and culture. In the book his arguments are recommendations with the aim of convincing the reader that rumors of the death of Western civilization are greatly exaggerated. Much of our present self doubt, argues Scruton, is brought about by the Darwinian theory of evolution. Darwin encourages us to see human emotion as a reproductive strategy. This is a perspective which Scruton attacks vehemently especially in its modern proponents--Desmond Morris and Richard Dawkins. This the author believes undermines the belief in freedom and the moral imperatives that stem from it.

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“An intellectual challenge and an entertaining read.” ―Richard Hayton, Political Studies Review

“What may be found here is a collection of acute observations about modern attitudes, arguments undermining their essential assumptions, and references to the past which enable the reader to set moral and intellectual enquiry into a wide frame of reference. The essays are certainly polemical, and are clearly intended to be; they are, however, elevated above the trivial rhetoric of modern politics, and achieve a distinction that is at once apparent and readily accessible. His essays are prophetic assaults upon the superficial and false understandings inherent in the substitute morality now mandatory in modern materialist thought...there remains intellectual engagement of a high order.” ―Edward Norman, Church Times

About the Author

Sir Roger Scruton is widely seen as one of the greatest conservative thinkers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and a polymath who wrote a wide array of fiction, non-fiction and reviews. He was the author of over fifty books.

A graduate of Jesus College, Cambridge, Scruton was Professor of Aesthetics at Birkbeck College, London; University Professor at Boston University, and a visiting professor at Oxford University. He was one of the founders of the Salisbury Review, contributed regularly to The Spectator, The Times and the Daily Telegraph and was for many years wine critic for the New Statesman. Sir Roger Scruton died in January 2020.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Bloomsbury Continuum
Publication date ‏ : ‎ April 23, 2019
Edition ‏ : ‎ New
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Print length ‏ : ‎ 224 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1472965221
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1472965226
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.68 x 8.53 inches
Best Sellers Rank: #1,889,217 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,034 in Political Commentary & Opinion
- #1,095 in Political Conservatism & Liberalism
- #1,854 in Political Philosophy (Books)
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Roger Scruton

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Roger Vernon Scruton, FBA, FRSL (/ˈskruːtən/; born 27 February 1944) is an English philosopher who specialises in aesthetics. He has written over thirty books, including Art and Imagination (1974), The Meaning of Conservatism (1980), Sexual Desire (1986), The Philosopher on Dover Beach (1990), The Aesthetics of Music (1997), Beauty (2009), How to Think Seriously About the Planet: The Case for an Environmental Conservatism (2012), Our Church (2012), and How to be a Conservative (2014). Scruton has also written several novels and a number of general textbooks on philosophy and culture, and he has composed two operas.

Scruton was a lecturer and professor of aesthetics at Birkbeck College, London, from 1971 to 1992. Since 1992, he has held part-time positions at Boston University, the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., and the University of St Andrews. In 1982 he helped found The Salisbury Review, a conservative political journal, which he edited for 18 years, and he founded the Claridge Press in 1987. Scruton sits on the editorial board of the British Journal of Aesthetics, and is a Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Scruton has been called "the man who, more than any other, has defined what conservatism is" by British MEP Daniel Hannan and "England’s most accomplished conservative since Edmund Burke" by The Weekly Standard.

Outside his career as a philosopher and writer, Scruton was involved in the establishment of underground universities and academic networks in Soviet-controlled Central Europe during the Cold War, and he has received a number of awards for his work in this area.

Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Pete Helme (http://www.rogerscruton.com) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

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Kathy
Roger Scruton explains the conservative view with great depth and understanding
Reviewed in the United States on May 27, 2015
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Roger Scruton explains the conservative view with great depth and understanding. His writings have been a real eye-opener for me, and have changed the way I think about many things. As we rush headlong into an uncertain future, the wisdom imbedded in the conservative view would serve us well, and this book tells us how and why.

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5 people found this helpful

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Fernando
Amazing
Reviewed in the United States on December 29, 2019
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Great book

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Ken Braithwaite
Very stimulating
Reviewed in the United States on September 15, 2011
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An excellent collection of essays whose connecting thread is the value of the traditional nation state. Lots to agrre with and lots to disagree with, but always well put.

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3 people found this helpful

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Samuel J. Sharp
Unique Discussions on Conservatism
Reviewed in the United States on March 2, 2013
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This collection of 11 essays presents British philosopher Roger Scruton's ideas on a variety of subjects, from the importance of national sovereignty to the conservatism of T.S. Eliot. Scruton writes forcefully and reaches conclusions on environmental protection and assisted suicide that will intrigue American conservatives. His chapters on politics are insightful and appropriately nuanced, but not always as argumentative as the book's title suggests. Because the book is a collection of essays rather than a monograph, the ideas in each chapter are never tied together to present an overarching system of political thought. Rather than "arguments for conservatism", the collection is better characterized as "observations from a conservative disposition on various topics." This is not to say the collection is not worth reading, only that readers looking for a more cohesive book may prefer Scruton's "Meaning of Conservatism" instead.

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27 people found this helpful

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Jesse Stout
England and Nowhere
Reviewed in the United States on August 1, 2019
Format: Kindle
A luminous assortment of essays on modern predicaments, Sir Roger Scruton’s A Political Philosophy embodies one of its themes in the very looseness of its structure: the advisability of ad hoc over utopian (“final”) solutions. A first on the nation-state and a last on T. S. Eliot as modernist role-model notwithstanding, Sir Roger’s other, nicely bookended essays seem bound in no particular order. Therefore, I impose little sequence on my telling about what I consider the eight most brilliant, but there are, certainly, overlapping themes, a poignant call homewards and to clement political conversation among them.

What is to become of the nation-state amidst a storm of transnational aggression? The great wars of the 1600s over, allegiance dissociated itself from religion and was firmly reattached to quasi-sacred jurisdictions. Inhabitants of such jurisdictions (somehow?) became citizens bound to their land, each other, and their government by reciprocal rights and duties. In a regime of citizens, even the highest power can be brought to heel, but this regime is under siege. Corporations want access to international markets. Radicals call for the dissolution of nations in one-world government. Didn’t nationality fuel the Nazis? But that was nationalism, not national loyalty: the latter seeks only to conserve the fatherland against entropy.

In “Conserving Nature,” Sir Roger points to the vast majority of environmentalists who ally themselves with transnationalism, socialism, and “open borders.” According to Sir Roger, the greatest weakness of environmentalism is unconcern about human motivation: what makes Joe want to keep our world clean? Not an abstract crusade, but something close to home and heart. Strangely, while they seek to mobilise communities to take action, environmentalists rarely consider the one community that already has a “political shape,” the nation-state.

“Meaningful Marriage” warns against the ongoing reduction of marriage to a “sexual handshake.” In The Middle Ages, marriage came to represent a “radical existential change” for the couple involved. The Renaissance continued to celebrate married love, but, since modern times, we have witnessed its steady de-sacralisation. Marriage law has been constantly amended, transforming an institution for handing down social capital into a merely private deal. What needs to be restored is the “peculiar intentionality of human sexual emotion.”

“Extinguishing The Light” takes on today’s humanities curricula. One liberationist cadre has ousted another until irony was all that there was left. Sir Roger explains that such a “culture of repudiation” is the normal result of the breakdown of an old religion. First comes Enlightenment, which endows the professoriate with “a new and redemptive role” as apostles of “truth in general.” Eventually, however, even “truth in general” is discarded, and the “would-be priest [professor] is moved to acts of iconoclasm” fierce as his faith might have been strong

In “Religion And Enlightenment,” Sir Roger explains that religion is not founded on belief in supernatural beings; “its meaning lies in the community it shapes.” Religion is, moreover, deeply rooted in sentiments even the faithless possess and, so, is a concern for all of us. The first wave of secularisation aimed to respect the faithful while the second seeks the eradication of the holy everywhere in public life. In its wake, we might lend survivors the minimal legal protection for their feelings a law against public sacrilege might afford.

In “The Totalitarian Temptation,” Sir Roger defines the totalitarian society as one lacking any fundamental restraint on central authority. All totalitarian ideologies have “a single source, which is resentment.” While not inherently evil, resentment must not be released from its place among other feelings to become a governing emotion. The resentments of a man on the turn towards the totalitarian are not “concrete responses to momentary rebuffs but accumulating rejections” by “the system.”

“The Nature Of Evil” explains that the evil person is far from merely selfish; rather, he is uncannily “disinterested” in seeking to destroy the soul of another as if for the sake of destruction itself. There are evil systems as well as people, such as that of The Soviet Empire, which seem to perpetuate evil without any one person intending it. To whom, in such systems, should we impute the evil? For not to impute it is to deny that it is evil at all as opposed to misfortune. Sir Roger isn’t sure, but it is in his character anyway to confront the problem.

In “Eliot and Conservatism,” Sir Roger traces the career of T.S. Eliot and what its arc can teach us. Eliot’s early poems, “Prufrock” included, “suggest a bleak and despairing agnosticism.” For a long while—and it was during this time he wrote “The Wasteland”—Eliot cultivated an anthropological sensibility, combining religious feeling with doctrinal uncertainty. In “The Four Quartets,” Eliot finally became as much an Anglican as he was a modernist, clarifying language so as to confront rather than glaze over modern secular desolation.

Without Sir Roger, are we extinguishing our own light? With his message, which is for every educated man and woman, can we begin to stop erasing, replacing, resenting, and rejecting our patrimony? As Sir Roger urges us in the poetry of Goethe, Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast, erwirb es, um es zu besitzen: what you have inherited from your fathers—earn it that you might own it. The decision to own our inheritance Sir Roger leaves in our hands.

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Amazon Customer
Wonderful Book
Reviewed in the United States on March 31, 2007
Format: Hardcover
Roger Scruton presents a conservatism largely at odds with the American self-styled conservatives of libertarian or neo-con persuasion. Part of his presentation is based on the idea of the social contract as a form of trusteeship between the unborn, the dead and the (merely) living. This is a very persuasive Burkean view leading to all kinds of conclusions that will surprise American readers.

For example, he devotes chapters to the morality of eating animals and the squandering of natural resources by the living generation. Consider this statement and compare it to the Republican Party's platform: "Environmentalists and conservatives are both in search of the motive that will defend a shared but threatened legacy from predation by its current trustees." That is, he argues forcefully that conservation (of both morality and the natural world) flows naturally from conservativism, an argument that would have him thrown off the WSJ's top floor.

One of Scruton's great strengths is his unwillingness to bend his thought to a given political platform. In this regard, I see no similarity whatsoever with American neo-cons. Further, Scruton has a very sophisticated, historically-grounded theory of State (with traces of Hegel to boot), something wholly absent from contemporary advocates of America as an ideology and nothing more. This man is the thinking man's conservative, a creature long-absent in American thought. Let's hope he begins to make an impression here. Wonderful.

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E. Veiga
Fantastic collection of essays
Reviewed in the United States on January 5, 2007
Format: Hardcover
British philosopher Roger Scruton shows brilliance and great erudition in a collection of essays on marriage, death, religion, the nature of evil and 'Eliot and conservatism', for example. Quite a trip. Reminded me of Irving Kristol's fantastic 'Neo-Conservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea'. This was my first book by Scruton--I came across him in a co-ed piece he wrote to the Wall Street Journal--and fortunately he authored many others. Wikipedia says "he is widely regarded as the most important living British conservative philosopher", which is not at odds with the high caliber of these essays. The book also contains ample footnotes for those interested in his bibliography, and of course an index.

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mdparis
Un ouvrage paradoxal, conservateur et innovant
Reviewed in France on March 24, 2013
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Livre de qualité, en bon état, reçu dans les temps, que je vais lire avec interet comme une introdution à nouvel univers de pensées

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APU
La claridad
Reviewed in Spain on August 12, 2023
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
Roger Scruton presenta y defiende el mallazo que sostiene el pensamiento conservador y sus consecuencias en el comportamiento de las personas, sin molestarse en abordar las caricaturas y la manipulación que se hace del mismo.

Situándose como Burke en los fundamentos de esta filosofía, la presenta con tal claridad que acaban por iluminarse los aspectos menos abordados aunque son fundamentales.

Se trata de una referencia inevitable sobre esta forma de pensar y el comportamiento que se desarrolla a través de ella.

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Barbara
An excellent analysis of the Conservative position from a philosopher who ...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 23, 2016
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An excellent analysis of the Conservative position from a philosopher who really understands his subject and can present it in a way which is both easy to follow and profound at the same time. If you think you know Conservatism from the Tory party presentation of it, this book will be a revelation. From the standpoint put forth in this book, real Conservatism is a viable and attractive proposition which is inclusive, open in outlook and encouraging individual freedom and self-reliance, while the Tory version of it is shown to be just a neo-liberal position with no meaningful framework and stagnant in its attitudes. A highly interesting account of the true meaning of Conservatism.

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Cliente Amazon
Molto logico nelle conclusioni dopo i fatti presentatl
Reviewed in Italy on August 1, 2020
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
Fa capire molto della attuale politica e della importanza che l’Europa diventi nazione.

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mr colin tuson
Excellent book
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 20, 2019
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Excellent and erudite book

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5.0 out of 5 stars Roger Scruton explains the conservative view with great depth and understanding

5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing

5.0 out of 5 stars Very stimulating

4.0 out of 5 stars Unique Discussions on Conservatism

5.0 out of 5 stars England and Nowhere

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful Book

5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic collection of essays

Top reviews from other countries

5.0 out of 5 stars Un ouvrage paradoxal, conservateur et innovant

5.0 out of 5 stars La claridad

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent analysis of the Conservative position from a philosopher who ...

5.0 out of 5 stars Molto logico nelle conclusioni dopo i fatti presentatl

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book

Roger Scruton explains the conservative view with great depth and understanding

Amazing

Very stimulating

Unique Discussions on Conservatism

England and Nowhere

Wonderful Book

Fantastic collection of essays

Un ouvrage paradoxal, conservateur et innovant

La claridad

An excellent analysis of the Conservative position from a philosopher who ...

Molto logico nelle conclusioni dopo i fatti presentatl

Excellent book