‘The Meaning of Conservatism’: A Lucid Elucidation of a Lasting Philosophy
A review of ‘The Meaning of Conservatism’, by Roger Scruton; St. Augustine’s Press, 1980.
Sir Roger Scruton, the late conservative philosopher and world authority on aesthetics, had his Damescene moment when he was 24, and living in Paris during the hot days of May 1968. In his autobiography, Gentle Regrets, he describes watching what he perceived to be the spoiled student members of the French bourgeoisie tear up cobblestones to hurl them at police:
I suddenly realised I was on the other side. What I saw was an unruly mob of self-indulgent middle-class hooligans. When I asked my friends what they wanted, what were they trying to achieve, all I got back was this ludicrous Marxist gobbledegook. I was disgusted by it, and thought there must be a way back to the defence of western civilisation against these things. That’s when I became a conservative. I knew I wanted to conserve things rather than pull them down.
After graduating from Cambridge, his outspoken conservatism set him apart from his fellow academics. He notes with amusement that at Birkbeck College, London, at which he was Professor of Aesthetics between 1971 and 1992, only he and Annunziata, the ‘lunch lady’, were conservatives. This brought him not just attention but condemnation, which reached its peak in 1980 when he set down his ideas in The Meaning of Conservatism.
The year is important. In 1979, against a backdrop of widespread strike action dubbed ‘The Winter of Discontent’, Margaret Thatcher won a landslide election against James Callaghan and become the United Kingdom’s first female prime minister. Her election amounted to a fairly severe break with the way politics had been understood in the wake of the Second World War. The major political parties generally agreed on the truth of Keynesianism, the economic theory advanced by John Maynard Keynes. Among the basic tenets of this theory (to simplify) is that the government can and ought to regulate the economy. Although it was not till the 1980s that Thatcher ramped up her attacks on nationalised industries, she had set out her view already that liberal individualism was the way forward. To put it another way, the government should, à la Reaganism, get the hell out of the way.
Margaret Thatcher had won a landslide election against James Callaghan to become Prime Minister.
But this is not in keeping with the British conservative tradition, even if it is mixed up with the American one. Benjamin Disraeli, arguably one of my country’s greatest prime ministers, cared deeply about the working classes and social cohesion, and passed a raft of policies aimed at improving the lives of everyone: He provided social support for the worst-off and sought to protect the working classes from abuse. He said he believed in an organic society in which every part—namely, the different classes—had natural duties to one another. One of the reasons why the Conservative Party is in such a muddle at the moment is because half of it (again, to simplify) are conservative in the American sense, and half in the British, or at at any rate, Disraelian, ‘one-nation' sense.
What we find in Scruton’s little book is a fairly sharp rebuke to those who perceive conservative political theory as not worth grappling with and, on the other hand, those who claim the mantle of ‘conservative’ while being no such thing. It is both a defence and a call to action: Scrutonian conservatism reveres order, tradition and authority more than free-market economics or the pursuit of individual liberty. He is deeply interested in the bonds that make society cohere, and make each of its members feel at home in the world.
Fittingly, therefore, he begins by dismantling what he sees as the corrupted form of conservatism advanced to some extent by Margaret Thatcher and others. A stable society, writes Scruton, rests on its institutions: the church, the country, the family. And these, he says, are not just useful but good. A conservative ought to defend them because they are useful and because they are valuable. They are part of a moral order that must, he writes, be conserved, for they promote values and virtues, such as duty, loyalty, and responsibility, that guide our conduct.
A stable society, writes Scruton, rests on its institutions.
The family, for instance, is not just a social unit but a moral one, where love, self-sacrifice and care both for the next generation and, in time, the previous one, are expressed and made habitual. It is not difficult to see how that might benefit society on the whole, and encourage us to think of the generations that built the world we inhabit and those that will inherit it from us. (Interestingly, Marx said the ideal socialist society was prefigured in the bourgeois family.) So for Scruton, we must see ourselves as stewards of our inheritance, not simply using up social capital but preserving it and even increasing it. In this, he follows Edmund Burke, sometimes called ‘the father of conservatism’. ‘Society,’ Burke wrote in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, ‘is but a contract between the dead, the living and those yet to be born.’ As for the the church, writes Scruton, it provides spiritual guidance and a sense of the sacred, while the nation offers a framework for civic duty and patriotism.
Scruton draws not only on Burke as he sets out his stall but on Hegel and Kant. He addresses common notions that appear in contemporary political debate, arguing that neither freedom nor equality amount to anything more than shallow ideals if they are not rooted in a deeper sense of belonging and duty. He argues that property and the right to it are crucial because property ties us to the land and so to those with whom we share it.
This being a book of conservative dogmatics, it is apt that among its central themes is a deep scepticism towards change. Elsewhere, Scruton has written that 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 spurs the conservative, Scruton included, to follow the principle in which ‘Chesterton’s fence’ consists: change should not be made until the reasoning behind the current state of affairs is understood. (It is called Chesterton’s fence because he imagined that a reforming person, noticing a short piece of unattached fence in a field, would, failing to understand why it was there, sweep it away. A conservative, on the other hand, would seek to find out if there was a reason it was there and only on discovering there wasn’t, would let it be removed.)
This spurs the conservative, Scruton included, to follow the principle in which ‘Chesterton’s fence’ consists.
This way of seeing things trains the conservative’s attention on tradition, and she does this, then she might find that there is a practical wisdom contained in many if not all traditional forms of conduct. Good manners, for example, builds the habit of gratitude, protects the person’s pride and smoothes social intercourse, which makes everything run more efficiently. More counter-intuitive is how Scruton views freedom. Authority, often viewed as the enemy of freedom, creates a peaceful and orderly context in which freedom can be expressed. Without it, argues Scruton, society soon descends into chaos, and individuals become isolated, miserable and profoundly unfree.
The technical challenge Scruton faces is that conservatism is more of an attitude than a systematic doctrine, and attempting to translate that attitude into the idiom of principle and idea is no easy task. In my view Scruton rises to this challenge and overcomes it: there is perhaps no contemporary philosopher who can so eloquently and clearly and generously do this. That said, I cannot imagine this would be a very satisfying read for someone beginning from a standing start, as it were. Some grounding in political philosophy comes in handy.
I have reviewed a few of Scruton’s books and always I am struck by the care and attention he devotes to his style. He writes with real clarity, which is such a relief when you are used to wading through the jargon and clotted prose, or on the other hand, that complete lack of soul that characterises much modern academic writing. There is dry humour throughout and a few choice barbs are levelled at those Scruton perceives to have misunderstood the political philosophy to which he gave so much of his life.
The collapse of the Berlin Wall in November, 1989 not only brought an end to the Soviet empire (Scruton, incidentally, belonged to a network of scholars supporting the opposition in Soviet Czechoslavkia) but it was seen to vindicate many conservative thinkers who had affirmed tradition, continuity, democracy, liberalism and the nation-state and attacked socialism and utopian thinking. Given this, it is difficult to see why Scruton’s book, as bold and uncompromising as it is, caused him so many problems. For your humble correspondent and critic, this is a fine presentation of a complex but popular and enduring political philosophy that is reflected in many perfectly sound and common-sense sentiments such as ‘better safe than sorry’, ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ and ‘don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater’. What Scruton asks us, as always, to do is think deeply.
