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Don’t idolise Roger Scruton
This article is taken from the November 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
Why do we still read Roger Scruton? For many of his friends and followers, we read Scruton in order to meet him again. It is impossible to read his work without hearing his voice. It is a profoundly comforting one. It is gentle and humane, objective but compassionate — a very English voice. Hearing him speak, or encountering his words, feels like being ushered into the library of a country house with a fire roaring in the grate.
Sir Roger was a fitting intellectual icon for a nation that is not naturally attracted to public intellectuals. He wore his learning lightly, expressing his ideas plainly but elegantly. With his adventures in Eastern Europe, there was just a touch of Richard Hannay about him. Many of his young fans will have first encountered him on YouTube, in videos where he expressed the common sense of previous generations on questions like nationality and sexuality.
The atmosphere of outrage and opprobrium that he generated on the Left added to his appeal, especially when contrasted with his evident calm and kindness. That disconnect, that sense of being lied to, has been the start of many intellectual journeys away from progressivism.
Rather than the dry fact-mongering of Fabian technocrats, or the ideological heavy-handedness of postmodern sociologists, Scruton offered conservatives the elegant rhetorical weapons of a more civilised age. He appealed to the changeless wisdom of tradition and intuition in our moral and political judgments, and his approach to philosophy was of warm invitation to conversation and thought, rather than didactic sermonising.
Scruton was a liberal in the sense Burke was a liberal: suspicious of unbridled state power, realistic about human nature, idealistic about the value of nature, art and education irrespective of their “social utility”.
At a time when conservatism, especially social and cultural conservatism, is uniquely marginal and delegitimised, Roger Scruton has been a crucial figure. His legacy has formed a rallying point for organising the routed forces of conservatism, and a source of respectability for conservatives in the arts and academy. There are organisations, talks, conferences and publications. Around the seed of the Scruton legacy has formed an entire support system for an otherwise dispossessed intellectual and cultural conservatism.
A vital signal booster in all this has been the ex-Eastern Bloc countries, where a combination of rising conservative and nationalist parties, and Sir Roger’s time involved in samizdat activity supporting resistance to Soviet Communism, has given his legacy an international significance. For Mitteleuropan conservatives, Scruton is an image of what they wish, and sometimes imagine, the anglophone world to be.
I was profoundly heartened and impressed by his legacy at a recent Scruton conference I attended on beauty. There was music and ballet; there were panels on art and architecture and good food and drink. It was, in a word, fun. In a realm of fusty panels by socially awkward graduates and sour conference coffee, Scrutonianism has brought a touch of the dionysiac, and there is no field that needs it more than modern academia. The cult of Scruton is, at its best, a mystery cult, initiating devotees by degrees into deeper habits of thought and reading, all whilst enlivening intellectual life with ritual libations.
So much to celebrate, we might say. And there is: as a beacon to illuminate a landscape, Scrutonianism is a salutary force. But as a campfire around which to huddle, problems begin to arise. For all the romanticism of being in political exile, the most common result of such marginalisation is a disconnection from the living vitality of culture, a tendency to worship static idols, and a general narrowing of intellectual horizons.
When I look around, I am still struck by the overall philistinism of much of the Right. In America Tucker Carlson hailed a podcaster, Darryl Cooper, as the greatest living American historian, in the same interview in which Cooper flirted with holocaust denial. Scruton’s legacy is sadly the exception to the rule of a Right which sneers at art, culture and intellectuals as effete liberal elites, out of touch with real life.
Scruton, sometimes along with Michael Oakeshott, forms a lonely star in a generally empty conservative intellectual firmament. This status as the singular standard bearer of English conservatism has not been conducive to clear thinking. Increasingly, we adopt the bounds of Scruton’s thinking as limits to our own imaginations.
What are these limits? Chief amongst them is the oft-cited quote, derived from Oakeshott, that conservatism is “an instinct rather than an idea”. It was a definition that, for Scruton, was informed by Kant’s pessimism about our ability to directly know reality via reason and the senses.
There is much that may be compelling and persuasive about this perspective, but it is far from being a timeless tradition based in the antiquity of Western Civilisation. Indeed, it is at direct variance with the perspective of more theologically informed conservative thinkers.
For German-American philosopher Eric Voegelin, traditional cultures are expressions of a divine order, that mediate the transcendent to us by a ritual organisation of symbols; a perspective on culture not dissimilar to that of TS Eliot, who writes of the “idea of a Christian society” in Culture and Christianity. The most ancient and basic definition of a traditional, sacred continuity in political order is precisely of a concrete idea — the res publica — or “common thing”, an idea often rendered in modern thinking as “the common good”. This is much more than just an “instinct” as Scruton put it.
I raise this point of contention not to dismiss Scruton, whose insights are real and valuable, but to briefly demonstrate the variation and complexity in how conservatism can and has been defined. Healthy political movements are contested and ever-evolving, but conservatism today is too often reduced to a sentiment rather than a worldview capable of grappling with the vast challenges of the modern world.
Not only have limiting lessons been drawn from Scruton’s work, other aspects of his thought and life have sometimes been ignored as inconvenient. There is a Byronic wildness and sensuality to his work that has too often been tamed in the cause of reducing him to a generic tweedy conservative. There is some Nietzschean muscle moving beneath the surface of Scruton’s writing, the vigour and dynamism of Matthew Arnold and Thomas Carlyle, a grappling with ambiguity and a noble quest for meaning in the desert of modernity.
Likewise, his admiration for non-Western cultures has all too often been overlooked in his recruitment as an avatar of “Western Civ”. Along with King Charles, Scruton had a lively interest in the sense of conservatism as an eternal and universal idea, one shared across religious and civilisational boundaries. The Right’s desire to critique Islam has seen Scruton’s own interest and admiration for classical Islam under-explored, as his former student Ed Husain has noted.
The limits of conservative thinking are more than just a question of intellectual niceties, but represent a barrier to success and clear thinking. The focus on Scruton, who had much to say about ethics and aesthetics but less about economics, perhaps reflects a conservatism uncomfortable with addressing material conditions in an age where the free market is failing to deliver either greater equality or growth.
The simultaneous failure of state and market is a crisis that the Right is ill-equipped to respond to, lacking as it does a coherent account of either. Many default to the certainties of the confident 1980s, whilst others engage in an incoherent populist opposition to “globalisation”.
The third way politics of mutualism and distributism was once the most lively and vital alternative to big state and big business. Defined as Christian or Tory socialism, and promoted by such figures as Ruskin, Owen, Tawney and Morris, it is a distinctively British economic tradition, a ready-made answer to many of our modern woes.
Here too we see how Scrutonianism can be both limited and self-limiting. Scruton’s limits — his non-systematic approach, his focus on aesthetics and humanism over structures and abstractions — can act as an alibi for refusing to rethink conservatism’s relationship to the free market. Yet the many aspects of Scruton that don’t fit the Hayekian worldview — his affection for the “benign welfare state” he grew up with, his warnings about the dangers of inequality, and his scepticism of the untrammelled market — are rarely touched upon.
An imaginative conservatism should see in Scruton’s centring of beauty in architecture and design a natural affinity with the articulation of craft as a political and economic ideal in the likes of William Morris. There is a politics and an economics of conservatism to be forged, but it requires making of itself more than an aesthetic gloss of Reaganism.
Roger Scruton’s legacy ought to be, like Dante’s Virgil, as a guide that opens us to the full richness and complexity of thought and reality. But for some, he risks becoming an idol. Scruton defined idolatry as a profanation involving “putting a substitute in place of that for which there are no substitutes” rendering something unique and irreplaceable as an interchangeable “currency”.
To substitute Scruton for conservatism itself would profane both conservatism and Scruton’s legacy, by treating them as tools to be employed to secure power. Sir Roger’s legacy deserves to be as generous-hearted and curious as the man himself.
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