Roger Scruton

When truth cannot make itself known in words, it will make itself known in deeds.

Roger Scruton (27 February 1944 – 12 January 2020) was a British philosopher, who worked as an academic, editor, publisher, barrister, journalist, broadcaster, countryside campaigner, novelist, and composer.

Quotes

In argument about moral problems, relativism is the first refuge of the scoundrel.

All of us need an identity which unites us with our neighbours, our countrymen, those people who are subject to the same rules and the same laws as us, those people with whom we might one day have to fight side by side to protect our inheritance, those people with whom we will suffer when attacked, those people whose destinies are in some way tied up with our own.

1980s

• Attitudes to death go hand in hand with attitudes to sex. And it is in the sphere of sex that some of the greatest of medical confusions have arisen. I refer in particular to the "sex change" – again, an operation which has exhilarated the public, with its implication that sexuality is an elaborate accident, which can be tailored to the individual need. A person's sexuality is no longer regarded as part of his essence. It has become an attribute, which he might change as he changes his clothes. The possibility of thinking in such a way shows a deep change in perception. The obligation to accept one's sex has dwindled, in the same way as the obligation to accept one's death. Consequently people call upon doctors to help them, demanding painful, expensive and dangerous operations, whose moral effects cannot really be envisaged in advance, and whose premise is a kind of delusion which, however it might arouse our compassion, ought not to inspire our connivance. No doubt the time is not far distant when sex-change operations will be obtainable on the National Health, granted on the advice of "experts" able to discern the "real" gender identity of the soul sheathed within each human envelope.
  • 'Dead? I demand a second opinion', The Times (29 March 1983), p. 12

• It goes without saying that apartheid is offensive. It was adopted, however, as the lesser of two evils. The Afrikaners believe that black majority rule has, in almost every case, led to the collapse of the constitutional government which they brought to South Africa, and upon which their freedoms and privileges – and perhaps even their lives – depend. And it did not seem so very bad to deny to blacks a vote which they would, when in power, promptly deny to themselves.
  • 'A lift at last for the other Afrikaners', The Times (17 May 1983), p. 12

• A developed legal system, with elaborate common law rights, and supported by a system of natural justice, was the most precious legacy of our empire. If it were still permissible to defend colonization, I should justify it in terms of this bequest, and at the same time contrast the colonization of Africa with the Soviet "colonization" of eastern Europe, which has advanced not by the generation but by the destruction of law.
  • 'A colonial inheritance once again cast off', The Times (6 September 1983), p. 10

• Race is at best an influence on behaviour, not the moral source of it. It is the individual alone who acts, and he alone who should bear the benefits and the burdens of moral judgment. In all questions of right and duty, it is both wicked and nonsensical to refer to a person's race – whether the purpose be to accuse him, or to exonerate him. To do so is to place the crucial attribute of responsibility where it does not belong – with the abstract totality, rather than with the concrete individual. The racist ignores every genuine right and obligation in pursuit of a merely abstract reckoning: he seeks to reward or punish the individual in respect of qualities which are not of his own choosing and for which he can in truth be neither praised nor blamed. It is surely obvious that racism is an evil. Even if it were not obvious from its intrinsic nature, it is obvious from its effects. Millions have died precisely because, in the eyes of the racist, they were already dead, being of "inferior" race, without rights, condemned by their very existence.
  • 'A socialist evil to rival racism', The Times (28 February 1984), p. 14

1990s

• Of course, there are those — Sandel, Walzer and Dworkin, for example — who propose "communitarian" ways of thinking, as a further move in the direction which a sophisticated liberalism requires. But none of them is prepared to accept the real price of community: which is sanctity, intolerance, exclusion, and a sense that life's meaning depends upon obedience, and also on vigilance against the enemy.
  • 'In Defence of the Nation', The Philosopher on Dover Beach (1990), p. 310

• An international socialism is the stated ideal of most socialists; an international liberalism is the unstated tendency of the liberal. To neither system is it thinkable that men live, not by universal aspirations but by local attachments; not by a “solidarity” that stretches across the globe from end to end, but by obligations that are understood in terms which separate men from most of their fellows—in terms such as national history, religion, language, and the customs that provide the basis of legitimacy.
  • "How to be a Non-Liberal, Anti-Socialist Conservative," Intercollegiate Review: A Journal of Scholarship and Opinion (Spring 1993)

• Schopenhauer argues that the empirical world exists only as a representation: ‘every object, whatever its origin, is, as object, already conditioned by the subject, and thus is essentially only the subject’s representation.’ A representation is a subjective state that has been ordered according to space, time and causality – the primary forms of sensibility and understanding. So long as we turn our thoughts towards the natural world, and search for the thing-in-itself behind the representation is futile. Every argument and every experience leads only to the same end: the system of representations, standing like a veil between the subject and the thing-in-itself. No scientific investigation can penetrate the veil; and yet it is only a veil, Schopenhauer affirms, a tissue of illusions which we can, if we choose, penetrate by other means. The way to penetrate the veil was stumbled upon by Kant.
  • A Short History of Modern Philosophy (1981; 2nd ed. 1995), p. 177

• Schopenhauer was not the only one of Hegel’s opponents to rest his faith in the unsayable. Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), in his attack on the prevailing Hegelian rationalism, sought to undermine the claim that ‘the real is the rational and the rational the real’, and so to reaffirm the value of that which, while real, lies beyond the reach of reason. But, lacking Schopenhauer’s gift of argument, and being indeed more literary than philosophical in his inclination, he did not set up any elaborate system of ideas whereby to postpone the recognition of his ultimate refuge. His principal interest was the vindication of the Christian faith, and he wrote directly or indirectly towards this end, inventing in the process the name, if not the philosophy of ‘existentialism’, for which achievement he is now chiefly known. His philosophy is a clear example of a reaction against idealism which is not also a form either of empiricism or skepticism. In the course of this reaction, it is once again the subject that is reaffirmed, as the ground of all philosophical thought.
  • A Short History of Modern Philosophy (1981; 2nd ed. 1995), pp. 181-182

• Yes, I am in favor of censorship, but it has to be conducted by people like me. And that's the difficulty (laughs). I'm in favor of encouraging every possible form of self-restraint and parental control. And I certainly don't think that pornography should be protected under the American Constitution.
  • Interview with Salon.com, 1998

• The modern world gives proof at every point that it is far easier to destroy institutions than to create them. Nevertheless, few people seem to understand this truth.
  • "Rousseau & the origins of liberalism," The New Criterion (October 1998)

• For we are social beings, who can exist and behave as autonomous agents only because we are supported in our ventures by that feeling of primal safety that the bond of society brings. We can envisage no project and no satisfaction on which the eyes of others do not shine. We are joined to those others, and even when they are strangers to us, they are also part of us. It is the indispensable need for membership that brings the national idea to our minds; and there is no rational argument that will expel it, once it is there. Without it, we are homeless; and even if our attitude to home is one of sour disaffection, home is no less necessary to our sense of who we are.
  • 'The First Person Plural', in Ronald Beiner (ed.), Theorizing Nationalism (1999), p. 291

• Those critics of the nation who have seen in it the root of xenophobia and racism, have often disparaged the imperial powers of Europe for their indecent contempt toward the "natives" of their territories. A picture has developed—by no means wholly wrong—of European despots, smugly convinced of their ancestral right of sovereignty, cruelly trampling on people whom they regarded as their genetic inferiors. But these very same critics are frequently enthusiastic supporters of the "national liberation struggles," whereby colonial peoples attempt to affirm themselves as nations, and to achieve independence in precisely that guise. Of course, the new nations are not the same kind of thing as the old ones, as I have argued. But they answer to the same need: the need for a bond of membership that will conform to the geographical and administrative realities, that will permit the dead and the unborn to stand beside us, and that will define our territory as home.
  Now you can't have it both ways. If nationhood is a boon to the peoples of New Guinea and Peru, it must also be a boon to those who formerly oppressed them.
  • 'The First Person Plural', in Ronald Beiner (ed.), Theorizing Nationalism (1999), p. 292

Modern Philosophy (1995)

Allen Lane The Penguin Press ISBN 0713991402

• A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is 'merely relative,' is asking you not to believe him. So don't.
  • "The Nature of Philosophy" (p. 6)

• Kant's position is extremely subtle — so subtle, indeed, that no commentator seems to agree with any other as to what it is.
  • "Some More -isms" (p. 25)

• In argument about moral problems, relativism is the first refuge of the scoundrel.
  • "Some More -isms", p. 32

2000s

• a postmodern rural consultancy
  • On his business, Horsell's Farm Enterprises. April 2001, interview in "Third Way" magazine

• Many Britons...feel strongly about something which was once called "the alien wedge". And surely it cannot be doubted, even by those who profess allegiance to the "multicultural society", that our society, unlike America, is not of that kind, and therefore that immigration cannot be an object of merely passive contemplation on the part of the present citizenship. There is perhaps no greater sign of the strength of liberalism (a strength which issues, not from popular consensus, but from the political power of the liberal elite) than that it has made it impossible for any but the circumlocutory to argue that the English, the Scots and the Welsh have a prior claim to the benefits of the civilization that their ancestors created, which entitles them to reserve its benefits for themselves.
  • The Meaning of Conservatism: Third Edition (2001), p. 62

• [W]hile it is a long-standing principle of British law that the fomentation of hatred (and hence of racial hatred) is a serious criminal offence, it is not clear that illiberal sentiments have to be forms of hatred, nor that they should be treated in the high-handed way that is calculated to make them become so. On the contrary, they are sentiments which seem to arise inevitably from social consciousness: they involve natural prejudice, common culture, and a desire for the company of one's kind. That is hardly sufficient ground to condemn them as "racist" – an accusation which has no definition in law, and against which there is now no defence. To be accused of racism is to be guilty of it: this is the great achievement of liberal thinking about nationality. One of the most important conservative causes in our time must surely be the attempt to undo the apparatus of censorship and intimidation, which has effectively silenced the appeal to national identity.
  • The Meaning of Conservatism: Third Edition (2001), p. 62

• From its beginnings the Conservative Party has been characterized by a relatively firm and enterprising fiscal policy, being responsible, not only for constant restrictions on free trade, but also for the introduction of regular income tax, and for legislation which governed the sale and conditions of labour. In the light of history, its post-war conversion to Keynesian economic theory might be seen as a natural intellectual development, a further move away from the view...that economic affairs are self-regulating...towards the more plausible view that the posture of the state is all-important, and that, without the state's surveillance, destitution and unemployment could result at any time. And it is perhaps no accident that, when the Conservative Party under Margaret Thatcher abandoned this conception of the state's economic role, and took up the banner of liberal economics, it was, in time, deserted by the electorate, so that the old alliance of interests which it had for a century represented suddenly fell apart. The odd thing, however, is that the policy which caused the Conservative Party's collapse – free market economics, under the aegis of global corporations – is the policy most fervently adopted by the New Labour Party of Tony Blair, and will no doubt be the downfall of that Party too.
  • The Meaning of Conservatism: Third Edition (2001), p. 106

• There is no doubt in my mind that, from the third-person point of view, monarchy is the most reasonable form of government. By embodying the state in a fragile human person, it captures the arbitrariness and the givenness of political allegiance, and so transforms allegiance into affection.
  • The Meaning of Conservatism: Third Edition (2001), p. 193

• In 1970s Britain, conservative philosophy was the preoccupation of a few half-mad recluses.
  • "Why I became a conservative," The New Criterion (February 2003)

• [Burke] emphasized that the new forms of politics, which hope to organize society around the rational pursuit of liberty, equality, fraternity, or their modernist equivalents, are actually forms of militant irrationality.
  • "Why I became a conservative," The New Criterion (February 2003)

• The strange superstition has arisen in the Western world that we can start all over again, remaking human nature, human society, and the possibilities of happiness; as though the knowledge and experience of our ancestors were now entirely irrelevant.
  • Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life (2005)

• When truth cannot make itself known in words, it will make itself known in deeds.
  • "Should he have spoken?", The New Criterion (September 2006), p. 22; also in The Roger Scruton Reader (2009) edited by Mark Dooley

• Hayek’s theory of evolutionary rationality shows how traditions and customs (those surrounding sexual relations, for example) might be reasonable solutions to complex social problems, even when, and especially when, no clear rational grounds can be provided to the individual for obeying them. These customs have been selected by the ‘‘invisible hand’’ of social reproduction, and societies that reject them will soon enter the condition of ‘‘maladaptation,’’ which is the normal prelude to extinction.
  • "Hayek and conservatism", in Edward Feser (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hayek (2006)

• Hayek fails to account either for the passion among intellectuals for equality, or for the resulting success of socialists and their egalitarian successors in driving the liberal idea from the stage of politics. This passion for equality is not a new thing, and indeed pre-dates socialism by many centuries, finding its most influential expression in the writings of Rousseau. There is no consensus as to how equality might be achieved, what it would consist in if achieved, or why it is so desirable in the first place. But no argument against the cogency or viability of the idea has the faintest chance of being listened to or discussed by those who have fallen under its spell.
  • "Hayek and conservatism", in Edward Feser (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hayek (2006)

• Hayek sees that the zero-sum vision is fired by an implacable negative energy. It is not the concrete vision of some real alternative that animates the socialist critic of the capitalist order. It is hostility toward the actual, and in particular toward those who enjoy advantages within it. Hence the belief in equality remains vague and undefined, except negatively. For it is essentially a weapon against the existing order – a way of undermining its claims to legitimacy, by discovering a victim for every form of success. The striving for equality is, in other words, based in ressentiment in Nietzsche’s sense, the state of mind that Max Scheler identified as the principal motive behind the socialist orthodoxy of his day. It is one of the major problems of modern politics, which no classical liberal could possibly solve, how to govern a society in which resentment has acquired the kind of privileged social, intellectual, and political position that we witness today.
  • "Hayek and conservatism", in Edward Feser (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hayek (2006)

• All of us need an identity which unites us with our neighbours, our countrymen, those people who are subject to the same rules and the same laws as us, those people with whom we might one day have to fight side by side to protect our inheritance, those people with whom we will suffer when attacked, those people whose destinies are in some way tied up with our own.
  • Rivers of Blood BBC2 documentary (8 March 2008)

• I don't think you can be a conservative in the end without being some kind of nationalist. You are always going to have in the back of your mind a conception of the community whose structure you are trying to retain.
  • Interview with Richard English and Richard Hayton in London (25 June 2008), quoted in Richard English, Richard Hayton and Michael Kenny, 'Englishness and the Union in Contemporary Conservative Thought', Government and Opposition, Vol. 44, No. 4 (October 2009), p. 352

• Conservatives have, on the whole, accepted nationality as a sphere of local duties and loyalties, defining an inheritance and a community that has a right to pass on its values from generation to generation. The nation may indeed be the best that we now have, by way of a society linking the dead to the unborn, in the manner extolled by Burke. And for this very reason it arouses the hostility of liberals, who are constantly searching for a place outside loyalty and obedience, from which all human claims can be judged. Hence, in the conflicts of our times, while conservatives leap to the defense of the nation and its interests, wishing to maintain its integrity and to enforce its law, liberals advocate transnational initiatives, international courts, and doctrines of universal rights, all of which, they believe, should stand in judgment over the nation and hold it to account.
  • "The Limits of Liberty," The American Spectator (December 2008)

• Liberty is not the same thing as equality, and that those who call themselves liberals are far more interested in equalizing than in liberating their fellows.
  • "The Limits of Liberty," The American Spectator (December 2008)

• A free society is a community of free beings, bound by the laws of sympathy and by the obligations of family love. It is not a society of people released from all moral constraint–for that is precisely the opposite of a society. Without moral constraint there can be no cooperation, no family commitment, no long-term prospects, no hope of economic, let alone social, order.
  • "The Limits of Liberty," The American Spectator (December 2008)

Modern Culture (2000)

[ Continuum ISBN 0826494447]

The core of common culture is religion. Tribes survive and flourish because they have gods, who fuse many wills into a single will, and demand and reward the sacrifices on which social life depends.

• The core of common culture is religion. Tribes survive and flourish because they have gods, who fuse many wills into a single will, and demand and reward the sacrifices on which social life depends.
  • "Culture and Cult" (p. 5)

• The first effect of modernism was to make high culture difficult: to surround beauty with a wall of erudition.
  • "Avant-garde and Kitsch" (p. 85)

• Without the background of a remembered faith modernism loses its conviction: it becomes routinised. For a long time now it has been assumed that there can be no authentic creation in the sphere of high art which is not is some way a 'challenge' to the ordinary public. Art must give offence, stepping out of the future fully armed against the bourgeois taste for kitsch and cliché. But the result of this is that offence becomes a cliché.
  • "Avant-garde and Kitsch" (p. 86)

• Faith exalts the human heart, by removing it from the market-place, making it sacred and unexchangeable. Under the jurisdiction of religion our deeper feelings are sacralized, so as to become raw material for the ethical life: the life lived in judgement.
  • "Avant-garde and Kitsch" (p. 91)

• The ethical life... is maintained in being by a common culture, which also upholds the togetherness of society... Unlike the modern youth culture, a common culture sanctifies the adult state, to which it offers rites of passage.
  • "Idle Hands" (p. 127)

A Political Philosophy (2006)

[ Continuum ISBN 0826493912]

• Conservatism is itself a modernism, and in this lies the secret of its success.
  • "Eliot and Conservatism" (p. 194)

• The conservative response to modernity is to embrace it, but to embrace it critically, in full consciousness that human achievements are rare and precarious, that we have no God-given right to destroy our inheritance, but must always patiently submit to the voice of order, and set an example of orderly living.
  • "Eliot and Conservatism" (p. 208)

• The future of mankind, for the socialist, is simple: pull down the existing order and allow the future to emerge.
  • "Eliot and Conservatism" (p. 208)

England and the Need for Nations (2006)

• Democracies owe their existence to national loyalties — the loyalties that are supposedly shared by government and opposition, by all political parties, and by the electorate as a whole. Wherever the experience of nationality is weak or non-existent, democracy has failed to take root. For without national loyalty, opposition is a threat to government, and political disagreements create no common ground.

• National loyalty is founded in the love of place, of the customs and traditions that have been inscribed in the landscape and of the desire to protect these good things through a common law and a common loyalty.

• Europe owes its greatness to the fact that the primary loyalties of the European people have been detached from religion and re-attached to the land. Those who believe that the division of Europe into nations has been the primary cause of European wars should remember the devastating wars of religion that national loyalties finally brought to an end. And they should study our art and literature for its inner meaning. In almost every case, they will discover, it is an art and literature not of war but of peace, an invocation of home and the routines of home, of gentleness, everydayness and enduring settlement.

• National loyalty involves a love of home and a preparedness to defend it; nationalism is a belligerent ideology, which uses national symbols in order to conscript the people to war.

• Never in the history of the world have there been so many migrants. And almost all of them are migrating from regions where nationality is weak or non-existent to the established nation states of the West. They are not migrating because they have discovered some previously dormant feeling of love or loyalty towards the nations in whose territory they seek a home. On the contrary, few of them identify their loyalties in national terms and almost none of them in terms of the nation where they settle. They are migrating in search of citizenship which is the principal gift of national jurisdictions, and the origin of the peace, law, stability and prosperity that still prevail in the West.

• Nationality is not the only kind of social membership, nor is it an exclusive tie. However, it is the only form of membership that has so far shown itself able to sustain a democratic process and a liberal rule of law.

• The idea that the citizen owes loyalty to a country, a territory, a jurisdiction and all those who reside within it — the root assumption of democratic politics, and one that depends upon the nation as its moral foundation - that idea has no place in the minds and hearts of many who now call themselves citizens of European states.

Culture Counts (2007)

[ Encounter Books ISBN 1594031940]

• A civilization is a social entity that manifests religious, political , legal, and customary uniformity over an extended period, and which confers on its members the benefits of socially accumulated knowledge.
  • "What is Culture?" (p. 2)
• The culture of a civilization is the art and literature through which it rises to consciousness of itself and defines its vision of the world.
  • "What is Culture?" (p. 2)
• This "knowing what to do"… is a matter of having the right purpose, the purpose appropriate to the situation in hand... The one who "knows what to do" is the one on whom you can rely to make the best shot at success, whenever success is possible.
  • "Knowledge and Feeling" (p. 35)
• [T]o teach virtue we must educate the emotions, and this means learning "what to feel" in the various circumstances that prompt them.
  • "Knowledge and Feeling" (p. 37)
• In all the areas of life where people have sought and found consolation through forbidding their desires—sex in particular, and taste in general—the habit of judgment is now to be stamped out.
  • "Rays of Hope" (p. 106)

2010s

• Throughout my adult life governments around the Western world have been propagating the gospel of multiculturalism, which tells us that immigrants, from whatever part of the world and whatever way of life, are a welcome part of our “multicultural” society. Differences of language, religion, custom, and attachment don’t matter, they have reassured us, since all can form part of the colorful tapestry of the modern state. Anybody who publicly disagreed with that claim invited the attentions of the thought police, always ready with the charge of racism, and never so scrupulous as to think it a sin to destroy the career of someone, provided he was white, indigenous, and male. To be quite honest, living through this period of organized mendacity has been one of the least agreeable ordeals that we conservatives have had to undergo. Keeping your head down is bad enough; but filling your head with official lies means sacrificing thought as well as freedom.
  • "Multiculturalism, R.I.P." The American Spectator (December 2010)

• Conservatives believe that our identities and values are formed through our relations with other people, and not through our relation with the state. The state is not an end but a means. Civil society is the end, and the state is the means to protect it. The social world emerges through free association, rooted in friendship and community life. And the customs and institutions that we cherish have grown from below, by the ‘invisible hand’ of co-operation. They have rarely been imposed from above by the work of politics, the role of which, for a conservative, is to reconcile our many aims, and not to dictate or control them.
  • "Stand up for the real meaning of freedom," The Spectator (January 2014)

• Conservatism is a philosophy of inheritance and stewardship; it does not squander resources but strives to enhance them and pass them on.
  • "Stand up for the real meaning of freedom," The Spectator (January 2014)

• The real reason people are conservatives is that they are attached to the things that they love, and want to preserve them from abuse and decay. They are attached to their family, their friends, their religion, and their immediate environment. They have made a lifelong distinction between the things that nourish and the things that threaten their security and peace of mind.
  • "Conservatism and the Conservatory,", National Review (December 2015)

• We are not born free, nor do we come into this world with a self-identity and autonomy of our own. We achieve those things, through the conflict and cooperation that weave us into the social fabric.
  • Where We Are: The State of Britain Now (2017)

• Our notions of place, neighbourhood and home have stood us in good stead in all our national emergencies. But this identity is under threat from an ethos of repudiation. This ethos is nothing new. When Britain faced the prospect of annihilation from Hitler's armies, George Orwell wrote a famous essay, The Lion and the Unicorn, urging his readers to unite in defence of their country. The ability of the British to defend themselves, he argued, had been undermined from within, by both right and left. The bewildered remnant of the old ruling class, and the intellectuals who recoiled from patriotic feeling and could not utter the word "England" without a sneer, were combining to betray their country to the Nazis.
  The instinct of the British people in the face of the threat was to resist it, since that is what duty and love both require... Orwell's essay was a passionate attempt to show that the ordinary people were right. They could be trusted precisely because they were motivated by neither the self-interest of the upper class nor the self-righteousness of the intellectuals on the left, but by the only thing that mattered: an undemonstrative love of their country.
  • 'Brexit will give us back pride in our island roots', The Times (18 November 2017), p. 35

• Orwell's essay speaks to us today. It tells us that patriotism is the sine qua non of survival, and that it arises spontaneously in the ordinary human heart. It does not depend upon any grand narrative of triumph of the kind put about by the fascists and the communists, but grows from the habits of association that we British have been fortunate enough to inherit. We do not use grand and tainted honorifics like "la patrie" or "das Vaterland". We refer simply to this spot of earth, which belongs to us because we belong to it, have lived in it, loved it, defended it and established peace and prosperity within its borders.
  • 'Brexit will give us back pride in our island roots', The Times (18 November 2017), p. 35

• [Asked "Do you still favour English independence?"] No, I don’t think I’ve ever really favoured English independence. My view is that if the Scots want to be independent then we should aim for the same thing. Scottish independence, I don't think the Welsh want independence, the Northern Irish certainly don't. The Scottish desire for independence is, to some extent, a fabrication. They want to identify themselves as Scots but still to be part of a,[sic] to enjoy the subsidy they get from being part of the kingdom. I can see there are Scottish nationalists who envision something more than that, but if that becomes a real political force then yeah, we should try for independence too. As it is, as you know, the Scots have two votes: they can vote for their own parliament and vote to put their people into our parliament, who come to our parliament with no interest in Scotland but an interest in bullying us.
• I've never been an optimist but that's fine because pessimists have the possibility of being agreeably surprised, and that's a reason for being pessimistic, but I've always defended a certain kind of pessimism because what is known as optimism is really a collection of illusions and I think one must recognise what all religious people know, which is that human beings are imperfect and fallen and there's no way in which they can alone surmount the problems which they themselves create.
  • From an interview with George Eaton "The Roger Scruton interview: the full transcript", New Statesman (26 April 2019, updated 7 June 2021)

How to Be a Conservative (2014)

• In discussing tradition, we are not discussing arbitrary rules and conventions. We are discussing answers that have been discovered to enduring questions. (p. 21)

• Take any aspect of the Western inheritance of which our ancestors were proud, and you will find university courses devoted to deconstructing it. Take any positive feature of our political and cultural inheritance, and you will find concerted efforts in both the media and the academy to place it in quotation marks, and make it look like an imposture or a deceit. (p. 40)

• Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created. This is especially true of the good things that come to us as collective assets: peace, freedom, law, civility, public spirit, the security of property and family life, in all of which we depend on the cooperation of others while having no means singlehandedly to obtain it. In respect of such things, the work of destruction is quick, easy, and exhilarating; the work of creation slow, laborious, and dull. That is one of the lessons of the twentieth century. It is also one reason why conservatives suffer such a disadvantage when it comes to public opinion. Their position is true but boring, that of their opponents exciting but false.

• We do not merely study the past: we inherit it, and inheritance brings with it not only the rights of ownership, but the duties of trusteeship. Things fought for and died for should not be idly squandered. For they are the property of others, who are not yet born.

Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left (2015)

Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands, Thinkers of the New Left (Bloomsbury, 2015)

Why is it after a century of socialist disasters, and an intellectual legacy that has been time and again exploded, the left-wing position remains, as it were, the default position to which thinking people gravitate when called upon for a comprehensive philosophy? Why are "right-wingers" marginalised in the educational system, denounced in the media and regarded by our political class as untouchable, fit only to clean up after the orgies of luxurious nonsense indulged in by their moral superiors?

• Why is it after a century of socialist disasters, and an intellectual legacy that has been time and again exploded, the left-wing position remains, as it were, the default position to which thinking people gravitate when called upon for a comprehensive philosophy? Why are "right-wingers" marginalised in the educational system, denounced in the media and regarded by our political class as untouchable, fit only to clean up after the orgies of luxurious nonsense indulged in by their moral superiors?

• The inescapable conclusion is that subjectivity, relativity and irrationalism are advocated [by Richard Rorty] not in order to let in all opinions, but precisely so as to exclude the opinions of people who believe in old authorities and objective truths. This is the short cut to [Antonio] Gramsci's new cultural hegemony: not to vindicate the new culture against the old, but to show that there are no grounds for either, so that nothing remains save political commitment.

  Thus, almost all those who espouse the relativistic 'methods' introduced into the humanities by Foucault, Derrida and Rorty are vehement adherents to a code of political correctness that condemns deviation in absolute and intransigent terms. The relativistic theory exists in order to support an absolutist doctrine. We should not be surprised therefore at the extreme disarray that entered the camp of deconstruction, when it was discovered that one of the leading ecclesiastics, Paul de Man, once had Nazi sympathies. It is manifestly absurd to suggest that a similar disarray would have attended the discovery that Paul de Man had once been a communist -- even if he taken part in some of the great communist crimes. In such a case he would haved enjoyed the same compassionate endorsement as was afforded to [György] Lukács, [Maurice] Merleau-Ponty and Sartre.

  • pp. 236–237

Quotes about Roger Scruton

In alphabetical order by author or source.

• Can a programme for less authority, less of the state, less supervision, be reconciled with the conservative idea?
  Roger Scruton is certain that it cannot. In his sombre, clerkly little book, he claims that freedom "cannot occupy a central place in conservative thinking ... for the conservative, the value of individual liberty is not absolute, but stands subject to another and higher value, the authority of established government." His concern is to hunt down and expose the liberalism which hides itself in conservative colours, and – though he does not explicitly say so – the present British government stands outside his definition of conservatism. Mr Scruton's is a rare, unfashionable voice in British political writing today: the voice of real authoritarianism. He could be a 20th-century inquisitor from Kingsley Amis’s fantasy The Alteration, to whom traditional power is its own end and the very questioning of power a sin. Even the Catholic Church is enfeebled by tolerance, in his opinion. Afflicted by the fad for reform, it has "partially forgotten the tradition of custom, ceremony and judicious manoeuvre ... calling to every man with the voice of immutable authority."
• He has quoted with approval from Joseph de Maistre, the French arch-reactionary, but hesitates to follow him to the conclusion that the public hangman is the key figure of the social order. And this illuminates an emptiness at the core of this amazing book. It is, as he says at the outset, a work of pure dogmatic. De Maistre thought that God wanted the sort of autocracy he described. Mr Scruton offers no sanction for his fearsome, static hierarchy. Religion may be encouraged, if it tightens the social bond, but is ultimately dispensable. Neither does he provide an anthropology suggesting that authoritarianism is the natural condition of the human race. His destructive criticism of liberal society has a black brilliance: his vision of the Leviathan which should replace it simply floats in the air. He asserts it is "natural"; he does not tell us why.
  • Neal Ascherson "Conservatives" London Review of Books Vol. 2 No. 21 (6 November 1980).
  • Article is partly a review of the original edition of The Meaning of Conservatism (1980).

• The roll-call of significant thinkers with both an abiding interest in music and sufficient musical literacy to write about it with the competence of insiders is short indeed: one thinks of Rousseau, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, perhaps Adorno. It is a cause for celebration when another such figure appears in our midst. Wagner is a particularly suitable subject for Scruton, who writes about the composer's dual nature as a musician and a thinker with uncommon insight and sympathy. His view of the nature of Wagner's achievement in Tristan und Isolde is highly original and mostly persuasive, and it illuminates even when it stimulates opposition. Death-Devoted Heart should be added to the short list of indispensable writings on this opera.
  • Karol Berger, review of Death-Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde" in Cambridge Opera Journal, Vol. 18, No. 1 (March 2006), p. 123

• Professor Scruton's Right consists of the authors of the Salisbury Review under his editorship and is the nearest intellectually reputable thing that England has had to the authoritarian Conservatism which de Maistre, in a Christian, and Maurras in a post-Christian, mode had propagated in France... Professor Scruton is a serious thinker who has produced a versatile and impressive oeuvre which, in addition to dealing with law and politics, deals with aesthetics, literature, philosophy and sexuality (in a sometimes off-beam way), gives unambiguous allegiance to art and culture as modern substitutes for religion, and leaves the impression of believing in "Conservatism" either as an aborted mixture of Christianity and secular truth, or as simply secular truth in itself. For a number of years when young he was a pupil and collaborator of Dr John Casey from whom he acquired intellectual range and seriousness, a faint excess of high-principled intensity, and a coat-trailing, or Irish, contentiousness about race and colour which he had since abandoned. Also, when young, he was a Fellow of Peterhouse, from which he acquired some of the attitudes of "the Peterhouse Right".
  • Maurice Cowling, 'Preface to the Second Edition', Mill and Liberalism (1963; 2nd ed., 1990), pp. xxviii-xxx

• There was a time when I knew him very well when he was a fellow at Peterhouse. I liked him very much. When he became editor of the Salisbury Review and for a little while afterwards I thought there was something faintly wooden about his politics, but now I regard him as a very, very good thing. It's not only that he writes about politics, it's that he writes about everything else. He's written a very good book about architecture and aesthetics, a huge great book about sex, a political book about conservatism, and very good books about Kant and Spinoza. He is a remarkably versatile and intelligent person. I used to have some reservations. I do not have any now.
  • Maurice Cowling, quoted in Naim Attallah, Singular Encounters (1990), p. 143

• Scruton's conservative philosophy draws upon Burke, Hegel, Oakeshott and Hayek, rejecting universalism and preferring instead a politics based on human instinct. In a Burkean compact between the living, the dead and the unborn, trust is placed in our collective inheritance, particularly in the form of societal organizations, practices and traditions, the law and the constitution. A sense of place and territorial loyalty is therefore central to identity. For Scruton, that place and identity is England, which is "shared not as a reality so much as an ideal which constantly impacts on reality".
  • Richard English, Richard Hayton and Michael Kenny, 'Englishness and the Union in Contemporary Conservative Thought', Government and Opposition, Vol. 44, No. 4 (October 2009), p. 352

• Scruton's Beauty is dense with ideas and rich with experience. Like a Renaissance still life, it lays out before us the bountiful fruits of long and successful hunting. Scruton's yield will do little for the jaded appetites of those professional hunters and gamekeepers who have sated themselves casually with their own catch in the field or on the road. But for others who love beauty and would like better to understand what it is they love and why, this book offers on every page and understanding without pedantry, clarity without dogma, insight without mystique.
  • Lenn E. Goodman, review of Beauty in The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 63, No. 3 (March 2010), p. 720

• It is partly his own fault that outside philosophical circles Roger Scruton's ideas labour under something like a government health warning. Xanthippic Dialogues, however, is a concentrated, integrated, and wholly delightful epitome of his thought, which should appeal to both the philosopher and the general educated reader, and dispel whatever misapprehensions and deliberate misrepresentations have kept its author's profound and humane understanding from receiving the public recognition it deserves.
  • Robert Grant, review of Xanthippic Dialogues in The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 44, No. 176 (July 1994), p. 400

• Roger Scruton's Aesthetics of music begins as a brilliant, intimidatingly thorough, rather dry exercise in analytical philosophy. It ends as a cultural tract for the times, a mystical rhapsody on the religious basis of art, and a scorching indictment of the twin evils of modernism and pop which have robbed music of its high purpose. To yoke together these two mutually hostile, if not downright incompatible, forms of discourse is a boldness that only Scruton would attempt. But he is bound to do so, given that for him the deepest roots of our being are implicated in even the simplest acts of musical understanding.
  • Ivan Hewett, 'A tract for the times', The Musical Times, Vol. 139, No. 1863 (Summer 1998), p. 53

• As a critic, Scruton is perceptive and persuasive... Roger Scruton seems characteristically British, however—an heir not only of the elite, eighteenth-century Dilettanti but of popularizing nineteenth-century propagandists such as Ruskin and Morris. Indeed, there is a moralistic fervor to his evangelism, and occasionally Scruton strikes one as a new Pugin, arguing the opposite side: favoring classicism rather than denigrating it. Unlike those ardent idealists of the last century, however, Scruton peppers his opinions with articulate British wit, irony, and sarcasm.
  • Paul Malo, review of The Classical Vernacular. Architectural Principles in an Age of Nihilism in International Journal of the Classical Tradition, Vol. 2, No. 3 (Winter 1996), pp. 444-445

• Architecture has long lacked a satisfactory treatment by philosophers dealing with the arts. Here, finally, a philosopher gives buildings full attention. The result is an impressive and persuasive account of the nature, objectives, and judgement of architecture that has, because it treats this as a matter of practical understanding, direct and practical application, not least to modern architecture... The Aesthetics of Architecture is a remarkable contribution that should interest designers, teachers, critics, and historians.
  • Michael McMordie, review of The Aesthetics of Architecture in Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 1981, Vol. 40, No. 1 (March 1981), pp. 85-86

• Roger Scruton's book [Aesthetics of Music] is the first account of music's nature and purpose — or at least the first to come my way — which attempts to explain what music is and what it is for. One reason for this is the far-ranging, wide-eyed, open-eared quality of his mind; another, more humbly practical, reason is that this may well be the only book about the philosophy and aesthetics of music that is copiously equipped with examples in handsomely printed music type... Roger Scruton's book speaks proudly on behalf of wholeness, haleness, and holiness; a beacon to our bleakness, its 'value' should endure.
  • Wilfrid Mellers, 'A voice in the wilderness', The Musical Times, Vol. 139, No. 1863 (Summer 1998), pp. 50, 52

• Scruton begins his book with an expert account of the origins of the Tristan story and Wagner's treatment of it. Scruton has absolute command of this material, and he eloquently organizes it around a few central points. As a concise account of the evolution of the Tristan myth, the first two chapters of Scruton's book are unsurpassed... Scruton's deep love of Tristan seems to render him blind toward the inconsistencies of the Wagnerian enterprise and the ruptures in the fabric of the Gesamtkunstwerk. Unfortunately, this blindness undermines Scruton's arguments in the final chapters of the book. In these pages, Scruton uses Tristan to pronounce jeremiads against contemporary culture, attacking (among other things) popular music and pornography. Scruton has important things to say here, and we would take him more seriously if he did not grip so tightly onto the meaning of Wagner's work. Scruton's eloquent and persuasive prose alerts us to ways in which Wagner's music cuts across the grain of contemporary notions about love and sexuality. But the ability of Wagner's work to "speak against" or to "speak across" depends at least in part to ways in which it resists decoding and presents irreconcilable paradoxes. Scruton seems unable or unwilling to acknowledge these qualities, and his work suffers as a result.
  • Stephen Meyer, review of Death-Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde" in College Music Symposium, 2005, Vol. 45 (2005), pp. 148-149

• Despite my reservations about certain aspects of Sexual Desire, it is a book which deserves and repays serious and careful consideration; it is at once a highly sensitive and refined exploration of a central but philosophically neglected part of our Lebenswelt, and a bold attempt to relate the Lebenswelt in general and the area of human sexuality in particular to its physical basis. Throughout the book Scruton manifests a deep commitment to philosophy as a humane discipline, a commitment seen all too rarely in contemporary philosophy. The upshot is to give one confidence that philosophy can still, on occasion, respond to the hopes that were once placed on it, of being at once rigorous and responsive to the resonance of the human world.
  • Anthony O'Hear, review of Sexual Desire in Mind, Vol. 97, No. 387 (July 1988), p. 496

• How, then, if music seems so self-contained and cut off from the everyday world in a way that literature painting can never be, can we engage with it so fully? And how can it be important to us?
  In his outstandingly good book, The Aesthetics of Music, Roger Scruton demonstrates, with all the erudition, eloquence and profound insight has become a hallmark of his writing, how an answer to the first question provides an answer to the second.
  • Frank Palmer, review of The Aesthetics of Music in Philosophy, Vol. 80, No. 314 (October 2005), pp. 594-595

• Scruton is at his best not when he is trying to import a 'scientifically'-orientated metaphysic into a phenomenological description, or when he seems to be doing so, but when he articulates so elegantly the humanity that lies in music. "Our music is the music of upright, earth-bound, active, love-hungry beings" (p.172). This book is full of such humane insight and is for that reason, and for many other reasons, compulsive reading. Roger Scruton is passionate and knowledgeable about music. He is also something which it is now unfashionable to be—a passionate and inspiring philosopher writing about what really matters.
  • Frank Palmer, review of The Aesthetics of Music in Philosophy, Vol. 80, No. 314 (October 2005), p. 600

• In many ways the topics covered by the book are new territory for Scruton. As a longstanding admirer of his writing and, though with rather more qualifications, of his thinking, I have read a good deal of his published output over the last few years, and find new themes in this book I do not recall before. The prospect of Scruton, the defender of hunting and elegist of rural England, defending the Enlightenment came as something of a surprise, though admittedly it is a somewhat Hegelianized and communized Enlightenment. His treatment of Islamic thought and ideas, while hardly uncontentious, is clearly fed by deep thought and much reading, and, as always, he writes like a dream.
  • Nicholas Rengger, review of The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat in International Affairs, Vol. 79, No.3 (May 2003), p. 661

• Roger Scruton has given us a fetching book on the nature and value of architecture, one which is almost as enlightening as it is infuriating (and that's saying a lot). There is a solid structure of argument at the heart of the book, but present too are all the occasions for pleasure usual with Scruton, such as a biting polemic and a nice style.
  • Flint Schier, review of The Aesthetics of Architecture in The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 33, No. 130 (January 1983), p. 100

• Scruton is one of the best philosophers currently writing on aesthetics and few can match his deep and catholic understanding of the arts.
  • R. A. Sharpe, review of The Aesthetics of Architecture in Philosophy, Vol. 55, No. 214 (October 1980), p. 569

• Philosophers seldom devote a book to a single art; hardly ever to architecture. Dr. Scruton's book is thus most welcome. It combines wide knowledge of architecture and architectural theories, copious examples and interesting views on aesthetics... Neither architects nor philosophers can ignore this book. Though I find parts of it questionable or arbitrarily stipulative, its richness, suggestiveness and scope make it absorbing reading.
  • F. N. Sibley, review of The Aesthetics of Architecture in Mind, Vol. 91, No. 361 (January 1982), pp. 143, 147

• This is an important book and one of the best to appear in a long while.
  • B. R. Tilghman, review of Art and Imagination: A Study in the Philosophy of Mind in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Autumn 1975), p. 75

• Scruton does not disappoint. To be sure, niggling doubts about his purely musical analysis surface now and then. While he obviously believes his own insistence that Tristan is thoroughly tonal, it also allows him the convenience of sidestepping a number of complex musico-dramatic issues. He also resorts on occasion, for example on page 98, to the kind of descriptive jargon in which dear old Imogen Holst indulged in her hagiographical writing on Ben Britten. But there are here many quite wonderful turns of phrase that say much, beautifully, in little space. Thus, for example: "Wagner was an intemperate thinker, whose theories were thrown out from his prodigious sensibility like spray from a ship in full sail". I wish I'd written that. Scruton's almost frightening erudition is paired with an ability to explain in lucid, comprehensible prose what are in fact complex philological and philosophical issues. Whether he is elucidating the Upanishads, Schopenhauer, Kant or mediaeval epics, he never browbeats the reader, but draws him in to arguments that seem to possess a remarkable inevitability. Scruton offers a succinct tour of Wagner's sources for Tristan that is the most lucid that the present writer has yet encountered
  • Chris Walton, review of Death-Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde" in The Musical Times, Vol. 146, No. 1891 (Summer 2005), p. 99

• One of the most important contributions to its subject matter since Ruskin.
  • David Watkin, review of The Aesthetics of Architecture in The Architectural Review (February 1980), quoted in Juan Pablo Bonta, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 39, No. 3 (Spring 1981), p. 328

• This book is a remarkable addition to the philosophical corpus in analytic musical aesthetics. Scruton may be unmatched in his numerous use of musical examples in a philosophical text. Unfortunately, it is almost too dense and too complicated to be of much use to anyone wanting to learn about musical aesthetics. A reader would be at a loss to understand much of what Scruton advances without not only a full understanding of the history of musical aesthetics in the philosophical realm, but also a good working knowledge of music theory and music history. Also, without a familiarity of the theories of Lerdahl and Jackendoff as well as a full comprehension of Schenkerian Analysis the reader may be at a loss about many of Scruton's explanations. Thus it is not a good tool for those interested in learning musical aesthetics, but it could be invaluable to those who want to deepen their understanding of the analytic end of the field.
  • Sarah Worth, review of The Aesthetics of Music in The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 52, No. 4 (June 1999), p. 983

External links

• The Home Page of Roger Scruton
• Salisbury Review Quarterly