The Philosophy of Roger Scruton

 ■Conservatism
 ■The Imaginative Conservative
 ■Edmund Burke
 ■Morality
 ■Philosophy
 ■Roger Scruton
by Mervyn Bendle
As the the conservative philosopher put it, his “unacceptable” views prompted character
assassination, three lawsuits, two interrogations, one expulsion, the loss of a university
career, contemptuous reviews, Tory suspicion, and the hatred of decent liberals everywhere.
And, he swears, it was all worth it.

Reality itself had been affronted. Repulsed, it

had recoiled and collapsed into countless pieces, never to be reconstituted. Such is the
striking image of the May 1968 French student rebellion recalled by Roger Scruton in his
autobiography, Gentle Regrets (2005; all quotations are from this source unless otherwise
stated). The twenty-four-year-old Scruton had completed a BA in philosophy at Cambridge
and was determined to be a writer, taking Jean-Paul Sartre as his role model because the
French existentialist’s prose moved effortlessly “from the abstract to the concrete and from
the general to the particular [and] wound philosophy and poetry together in a seamless web,
which was also a web of seeming,” as Scruton later recalled on his web page. From Sartre
he learned that intellectual life need not be confined to the academy but can flourish around
the creative arts like literature, art and music, “through which the world strives to become
conscious of itself.” But he rebelled against the Frenchman’s conviction that such a life
demanded a radical political commitment, and Sartre’s mindless embrace of Maoism in 1968
alienated him completely.
In the decades since, Scruton has established himself as Britain’s leading conservative public
intellectual and as an influential philosopher in a large number of fields, publishing some forty
books, innumerable articles, several novels and many other works. Nevertheless, on that May
Day forty-six years ago, anarchic leftism held sway and appeared momentarily to threaten
President Charles de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic.
Transfixed, Scruton watched as a violent battle between students and police unfolded
beneath his attic window until abruptly “the plate-glass windows of the shops appeared to
step back, shudder for a second, and then give up the ghost, as the reflections suddenly left
them and they slid in jagged fragments to the ground.” In this moment, at the centre of an
archetypal 1960s event, it appears that Scruton enjoyed an epiphany, a sudden intuitive
insight into the advent of the nihilistic postmodern era, characterised by the collapse of
representation, and the fragmentation, violence, heresy and unbelief that Scruton later
claimed in A Political Philosophy: Arguments for Conservatism (2006), provided the context
for the conservative philosophical response of which he has proven to be the most articulate
British proponent.
Earlier that day, reading de Gaulle’s Memoires, Scruton had been struck by the Gaullist
insight that a nation is defined “by language, religion, and high culture [and that] in times of
turmoil and conquest it is those spiritual things that must be protected and reaffirmed”, and
now he saw this sacred dimension under threat by the profane Dionysian forces that had
been unleashed below him, “throwing away … all customs, institutions and achievements, for
the sake of a momentary exultation which could have no lasting sense save anarchy.”
Later, Scruton was visited by a friend, a woman who had spent the day on the barricades
amongst the flying fists, batons and cobblestones. She was a devotee of Antonin Artaud’s
“theatre of cruelty,” a variety of late surrealism that assaulted the sensibilities of contemporary
audiences to tear apart the false reality that Artaud insisted lay like a shroud over

their perceptions. The May events appealed to

her as the high point of an anarchic assault on the absurdity of bourgeois life. Soon, she and
her comrades were convinced, “the Old Fascist de Gaulle and his regime would be begging
for mercy” as the student insurrection escalated into a new French Revolution. In fact, she
was deluding herself, as de Gaulle had no intention of begging. Instead, he had gone secretly
to consult the leadership of the French military to confirm their loyalty if he decided to crush
the protests, a task for which they were well equipped by their brutal experiences in the
Algerian War. If de Gaulle had taken that path he would have transformed the cultural and
political history of France and the West, but at the time the initiative and the momentum were
allowed to remain with the students and for a few critical months it appeared that the
bourgeois world they so despised was about to be overthrown.
But what, Scruton asked his visitor, do you propose to put in its place? “What vision of France
and its culture compels you?” To which, “she replied with a book: Foucault’s Les mots et les
choses, the bible of the soixante-huitards [sixty-eighters] the text which seemed to justify
every form of transgression, by showing that obedience is merely defeat.” Michel Foucault’s
tome had appeared in 1966 (English translation, 1970, as The Order of Things), becoming de
rigueur amongst intellectuals and students desperate to appear aligned with the avant-garde
of social theory, despite the fact that Foucault’s structuralist determinism reduced people to
the status of elements in a gigantic system and was the antithesis of the libertarian anarcho-
communism that the soixante-huitards professed. More often invoked as a magic talisman
than read as a coherent work of history, it was an impenetrable exercise in radical
scholasticism that established Foucault’s reputation as a “master thinker” of the Left.
For Scruton, The Order of Things “is an artful book, composed with a satanic mendacity,
selectively appropriating facts in order to show that culture and knowledge are nothing but
the discourses of power” to be condemned as just further forms of oppression. A work not of
philosophy but of rhetoric, “its goal is subversion, not truth”, and it perpetrates “the old
nominalist sleight of hand that was surely invented by the Father of Lies—that ‘truth’ requires
inverted commas, that it changes from epoch to epoch, and is tied to the form of
consciousness, the episteme, imposed by the class which profits from its propagation.” This
is a core conception of the cultural relativism that is now a taken-for-granted premise of
academic discourse, while Foucault’s “vision of European culture as the institutionalized form
of oppressive power is taught everywhere as gospel,” as Scruton laments.
Scruton doesn’t reveal what transpired that night after he confronted his guest with the
philosophical implications of her antinomian politics, although he mentions that she eventually
put the theatre of cruelty behind her and “is now a good bourgeois like the rest of them.” He
notes also that “Foucault is dead from AIDS, contracted during well-funded tours as an
intellectual celebrity,” but not before he passed on the disease in multiple sadomasochistic
homosexual encounters, as James Miller describes in The Passion of Michel
Foucault (1993).
At the time, Scruton “had felt a surge of political anger” as he discovered himself to be a
cultural anachronism, positioned perilously “on the other side of the barricades from all the
people I knew.” These people had turned their backs on a time-honoured world that Scruton
still revered, and now “looked [instead] to Marx, Lenin, and Mao Tse Tung as their authorities,
not just in politics, but in every area of human thought and action, art, literature, and music”,
embracing “nihilism, anger and selfishness,” as Mark Dooley recounts in Roger Scruton: The
Philosopher on Dover Beach (2009).
However, Scruton’s isolation seems to have been foreordained, as he appears never to have
been in danger of succumbing to the siren call of the 1960s zeitgeist. He had been inoculated
by the writings of Burke, Kant, Hegel, Eliot, Leavis and Wittgenstein, who had rejected “the
ways and manners of the Jacobins,” and all those driven by a desire to destroy that which is,
in a chimerical pursuit of that which can never be.
Dooley takes Scruton at his word, adopting the title of one of Scruton’s own books to present

him as a philosopher whose unyielding

conservatism left him homeless on a desolate shore as depicted in Matthew Arnold’s famous
poem “Dover Beach,” with its “powerfully dark picture of our homelessness in a cold,
indifferent world,” as Stefan Collini observes in Arnold (1988). According to Arnold, “the Sea
of Faith / Was once, too, at the full”, but now only “its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,”
can be heard, leaving just “the turbid ebb and flow of human misery”. For Dooley, Scruton’s
work offers redemption for those stranded on Arnold’s “darkling plain swept with confused
alarms of struggle and flight”. It is the great value of Scruton’s work, Dooley believes, that he
has “given us a way of philosophically affirming traditional institutions and forms of life, in a
world dedicated to their extinction.”
This reference to “forms of life” reflects the importance in Scruton’s thinking of the later
Wittgenstein, who originated the concept and for whom it was linked to similar notions
including “language games” and “worldview,” all of which emphasise the extent to which
knowledge is contextual and localised, embedded in concrete activities and experiences, and
constrained by language. This is related to another concept adopted by Scruton, that of
“Lebenswelt” or “life-world,” which he took from Edmund Husserl and phenomenology. This
refers to the myriad inter-subjective realms of meaning constructed and maintained by
communities of language-users for whom they serve as commonsense and taken-for-granted
everyday worlds. These related notions lie at the core of Scruton’s philosophical
conservatism, as he believes that scientific and industrial society has devastated the
traditional life-worlds and forms of life within which people have for millennia lived and made
sense of their lives, producing a metaphysical homelessness and a crisis of disorientation,
dislocation and alienation. Moreover, “this crisis is not only intellectual; it is also moral, indeed
a crisis of civilization itself. For the Lebenswelt falls apart when not maintained by reflection.
The result is a loss of meaning, a moral vacuum,” as Scruton observed in The Oxford History
of Western Philosophy (1994).
Scruton’s conservatism made him few friends in academia, as he discovered in 1971 after he
had completed his PhD and accepted a lectureship at Birkbeck College, “the heart of the left
establishment that governed British scholarship.”There, the likes of the communist historian
Eric Hobsbawm held sway, “the lionized historian of the Industrial Revolution, whose Marxist
vision of our country is now the orthodoxy taught in British schools.” Consequently, the library
was well stocked with the works of Marx, Lenin, Mao, and every variety of socialist journals,
but proudly bereft of Strauss, Voegelin, Hayek, Friedman and any conservative periodicals.
Finding himself treated as an “intellectual pariah” and unencumbered by any collegiality from
the Left, but with convenient teaching hours, Scruton took the opportunity to study law and
“discovered … the answer to Foucault” in the common law of England, which he took as proof
“that there is a real distinction between legitimate and illegitimate power, that power can exist
without oppression, and that authority is a living force in human conduct.”
Seeking to broaden his understanding, he went in search of a viable conservative philosophy
and found Edmund Burke, who was then regarded by the Left establishment as irrelevant and
of antiquarian interest only. Consequently, students “were still permitted to read him,” albeit
in association with Thomas Paine as part of the intellectual history of the French Revolution,
which many soixante-huitards saw as the model for the epoch-defining radical upheavals in
which they fancied themselves to be engaged.
Once again in stark contrast to his generation, Scruton approached Burke not from this
political direction but from their shared interest in aesthetics and how this field of philosophical
inquiry illuminates the affirmation of home, soil and settlement, which is the one theme that
unites all of Scruton’s many inquiries. And this is true whether these concern the elevated
realms of aesthetics and religion, or the more concrete concerns of environmentalism, fox-
hunting and wine.
Recoiling at “the desecration of my childhood landscape” by modern architecture that had left
him mentally homeless, Scruton came to see that:
aesthetic judgement lays a claim upon the world, that it issues from a deep social imperative,
and that it matters to us in just the way that other people matter to us, when we strive to live
with them in a community.
“Like Burke … I was in search of a lost experience of home,” a physical and psychological
sense of place that had been stripped away by the depredations of modernism, “with its denial
of the past, its vandalization of the landscape and townscape, and its attempt to purge the
world of history”. In A Political Philosophy Scruton spoke movingly of the attachment people
feel for a place “that is theirs by right, [a] place where you and I belong and to which we return,
if only in thought, at the end of all our wanderings.” A rampaging modernity ignores the
centrality for human beings of community, home and settlement and leaves behind nothing
but atomised individuals, “living like ants within their metallic and functional shells.”

This pervasive sense of homelessness can be overcome, Scruton believed: “underlying that
sense of loss is the permanent belief that what has been lost can also be recaptured,” albeit
in a modified form, “to reward us for all the toil of separation through which we are condemned
by our original transgression.” And he saw this redemptive faith as “the romantic core of
conservatism, as you find it—very differently expressed—in Burke and Hegel, in Coleridge,
Ruskin, Dostoevsky and T.S. Eliot.” It was found also in F.R. Leavis, who insisted in The
Great Tradition (1948) that superior literature displays “a vital capacity for experience, a kind
of reverent openness before life, and a marked moral intensity,” and found these qualities
present pre-eminently in the novels of Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph
Conrad and D.H. Lawrence. For Leavis, Scruton explained in The Philosopher on Dover
Beach (1990):
the task of culture was a sacred task [having] to express and to justify our participation in the
human world. And the greatest products of culture … were to be studied as the supreme
distillations of this justifying force.
They offer no abstract theoretical knowledge, “but life—life restored to its meaning, vindicated
and made whole.”
Scruton abhorred the modernist reduction of life to abstract categories and insisted on the
centrality of contextual and localised “social knowledge” once embodied in the common law,
political and social conventions, manners, customs, morality and civility of the traditional
English Lebenswelt, and which arose as by an “invisible hand” from the innumerable social
transactions, age-old negotiations and compromises perpetuated by custom to restrain and
channel conflicting interests and passions. In this he found support in Burke, who celebrated
the thriving variety and uniqueness of traditional life but also explored its political implications,
persuading Scruton that “the utopian promises of socialism go with a wholly abstract vision
of the human mind … that has only the vaguest relation to the thought and feelings by which
real human lives are conducted,” a theme he explored in The Uses of Pessimism and the
Danger of False Hope (2010).
Burke persuaded him that “societies are not and cannot be organized according to a plan or
a goal, that there is no direction to history, and no such thing as moral or spiritual progress,”
while all attempts to pretend otherwise must decline into “militant irrationality” as the
proponents of such visions struggle to impose their abstract template onto an intractable
world. Faced with such resistance, the would-be revolutionaries seek to mobilise the masses
around a shared hatred of a real or imagined foe: “Hence the strident and militant language
of the socialist literature—the hate-filled, purpose-filled, bourgeois-baiting prose, one
example of which had been offered to me in 1968”. Such clamorous discourse became “the
basic diet of political studies in my university”, and when Scruton dared to question it, “I
blighted what remained of my academic career.”
This blighting was accomplished above all by The Meaning of Conservatism (1979) which,
as Scruton put it in a 2004 interview, gave his leftist colleagues someone new to hate, with
the journal Radical Philosophy dismissing it as “clearly too ghastly to be taken seriously.” It
was a dense text that proposed a philosophical foundation for the Conservative Party as it
was about to enter into its years of triumph under Margaret Thatcher. Scruton himself
described it as “a somewhat Hegelian defence of Tory values in the face of their betrayal by
the free marketeers.” This stance provoked a befuddled response from the neoliberal Institute
for Economic Affairs, which recommended that Scruton “be avoided, as exhibiting dangerous
tendencies towards extremism,” or alternatively be recognised as “part of a sophisticated
KGB operation to split the Conservative Party.” Acknowledging his distance from
neoconservatism, Scruton agreed in the interview that the book revealed more of a kinship
with American paleoconservatism with its concern with tradition and religion, an expanded
civil society and a limited state, the value of the Western heritage, loyalty towards home, and
a strong sense of place and belonging.
The Meaning of Conservatism duly became a classic and gave Scruton a prominent profile
as an articulate champion of conservatism. This led to his appointment as editor of
the Salisbury Review, a journal named after a conservative Prime Minister who, as Scruton
observed, “kept everything so well in place that nothing now is known about him” (except
perhaps his observation that good government consists of doing as little as possible).
The Review took a strong stand on communism, the Moscow-inspired nuclear disarmament
and peace movements, the treatment of dissidents in Eastern Europe and Christians in the
Middle East, feminism, the various forms of postmodernism, political correctness, and
government enforced egalitarianism. It also saw the first appearance of a series of critical
articles by Scruton on Foucault, Sartre, Louis Althusser, R.D. Laing, E.P. Thompson,
Raymond Williams and others, which were later collected as Thinkers of the New Left (1986),
a scathing polemic against intellectual fascism that further entrenched his academic
alienation.
At the outset, Scruton found it difficult to find writers prepared to contribute to an explicitly
conservative journal at a time when the radical hegemony over the intellectual life of Britain
was virtually absolute. The dangers faced by contributors were exemplified by the Honeyford
Affair, when the Review published an article in 1984 on “Education and Race” by Ray
Honeyford, the headmaster of a middle school in Bradford, where some 95 per cent of the
pupils were Asian and Muslim. The article promoted integration, questioned multiculturalism,
and argued that the home environment in immigrant families was a primary determinant of
educational performance. Honeyford was duly accused of racism and was disciplined,
threatened, placed under police protection, sacked, reinstated after a court case, and then
forced into early retirement, never to teach again. Other contributors were sacked for
defending Honeyford and the Review was subjected to an academic show-trial and found
guilty of scientific racism, while the school itself was eventually burned down in an arson
attack. On the other hand, the controversy gave the Review a public profile and generated
the 600 subscribers it needed to survive.
As for Scruton, the University of Glasgow officially boycotted a paper he was to deliver there,
while at the same time conferring an honorary doctorate on Robert Mugabe. It also became
“a matter of honour among English-speaking intellectuals to dissociate themselves from me,”
to warn off prospective publishers of his books, give them bad reviews, and to obstruct his
bids for promotion. Overall, as he recalled in a 2002 article, “My Life Beyond the Pale,” his
eighteen-year editorship of the Review:
cost me many thousand hours of unpaid labour, a hideous character assassination in Private
Eye, three lawsuits, two interrogations, one expulsion, the loss of a university career in Britain,
unendingly contemptuous reviews, Tory suspicion, and the hatred of decent liberals
everywhere. And it was worth it.

One of the things that made it worthwhile was the impact the Review had in Eastern Europe.
An underground, samizdat, edition began to appear in Prague in 1986, and Scruton recalls
“their wafer-thin pages—the final carbon copies from sheaves of ten,” which he felt “had the
spiritual quality of illuminated manuscripts” and testified to “a belief in the written word that
had been tried and proved through real suffering” in Czechoslovakia and elsewhere behind
the Iron Curtain. Scruton was involved with the Jan Hus Educational Foundation, which
helped Western academics smuggle forbidden literature and provide classes in Prague and
Brno as part of an underground education network leading to university degrees. This led to
him being detained, expelled, and listed on the Czech Index of Undesirable Persons, but after
the fall of communism President Václav Havel awarded him the Czech Republic’s Medal of
Merit for his work.
Scruton learnt a great deal about totalitarianism by working with this underground network as
it struggled to provide medicines, bibles, religious materials, books, education and support
for writers and artists blacklisted by the communist regimes. As he recalled in a 2013 BBC
feature on democracy, totalitarianism
endures not simply by getting rid of democratic elections and imposing a one-party state. It
endures by abolishing the distinction between civil society and the state, and by allowing
nothing significant to occur which is not controlled by the Party.
He realised that “political freedom depends upon a delicate network of institutions,” which the
dissident network was desperately seeking to resuscitate. First among such institutions is an
independent judicial system and respect for the rule of law. Also of vital importance are
property rights, political pluralism and the presence of an opposition able freely to criticise the
government and contest power within a functional political system. Freedom of speech and
opinion are also essential, and here Scruton observed that a critical lesson is to be learnt
from the experience of communism: too many people in the West take these freedoms for
granted and assume that such liberalism is “the default position of mankind” to which we will
all inevitably gravitate. On the contrary, Scruton insists:
orthodoxy, conformity and the hounding of the dissident define the default position of
mankind, and there is no reason to think that democracies are any different in this respect
from Islamic theocracies or one-party totalitarian states.
By this time Scruton had developed a coherent conservative position, which he outlined in
his editor’s introduction to Conservative Thinkers: Essays from the Salisbury Review (1988).
“Conservatism, like liberalism, sees the individual as uniquely valuable and his condition as
the true test of political order”, however, unlike liberalism, conservatism emphasises concrete
happiness over abstract freedom, and sees individuality, freedom and happiness as “products
of social order,” and dependent on the institutional structures of society that nurture them.
Similarly, conservatism also places concrete duties above abstract rights, and in particular
emphasises the principle of reciprocity, whereby the availability of rights presupposes the
acceptance of duties and responsibilities. Underpinning this is a social order based on “three
principles: tradition, consensus, and the rule of law,” which Scruton elaborates to show their
interconnectedness. Here the core idea is derived from Burke and entails recognition of the
centrality of spontaneous order in society:
the traditional order is distinct from both planned order and random association. It contains
its own inherent principles of development, and is composed of instincts, prejudices and
values
—which represent the accumulated wisdom of all past generations. Consensus, which holds
the social order together, flows from this, as does justice, which requires a rule of law that is
rooted in tradition and consensus.
In Scruton’s view, conservatives should strongly resist the intrusion of the state into the many
areas where it lacks competence or there is no political or philosophical rationale consistent
with the position outlined above. “In particular, they oppose state interference in the market”,
except for the provision of public goods, while “some argue (with Hayek) that the attempt to
control the market is inherently irrational [and] is destructive of the state’s legitimacy,”
individual responsibility and social cohesion. It is also vital that the separation of state and
civil society is maintained. Consequently, conservatives strongly resist those revolutionary
doctrines (such as Marxism-Leninism and fascism) that threaten this balance, on the basis
that the “total invasion of [civil] society by political decision-making … is the mark of totalitarian
power.”
Scruton insists that religion plays a vital social role, and acknowledges that some
conservatives, like Eric Voegelin, even argue that political conservatism actually originates in
a religious attitude, and “identify the rejection of conservative political order with the heresies
and transgressions which undermine that attitude, and which destroy man’s humility before
the divine.” At the very least, conservatives recognise “the indispensability, in sound political
judgement, of religious ideas—in particular, ideas of original sin, corporate guilt and
suffering—and of the ever-present fear of death and retribution.” Such recognition highlights
the extent to which conservatives “place politics, culture and morality before economic order
and the distribution of power,” as Marxists and other radicals would have it:
[Conservatives] see politics not as the pursuit of some ultimate goal—whether national
supremacy, social justice or economic growth—but as the attempt to reconcile conflicting
interests, and to establish law, order and peace throughout society.
Over the past two decades Scruton has been able to refine and apply this conservative
paradigm to an astonishing array of areas, including aesthetics, the history of philosophy,
politics, religion, sexual desire, terrorism, environmental philosophy, farming, fox-hunting and
the enjoyment of wine, demonstrating conservatism’s relevance to a wide range of political,
cultural and social issues. On the topic of wine, for example, he published I Drink Therefore I
Am (2009), which moved one reviewer to observe facetiously that Scruton’s “dinner parties
sound a real gas: ‘A good wine should always be accompanied by a good topic’; he
prescribes, for example, ‘whether the Tristan chord is a half-diminished seventh or whether
there could be a proof of Goldbach’s conjecture’. Everybody back to Rog’s, then …”
A more highly relevant example is Green Philosophy: How to Think Seriously about the
Planet (2011), which attempts to develop an alternative approach to environmental problems
that avoids the potentially catastrophic statist solutions advocated by the Left (including
various forms of world government), and draws instead on the “oikophilia”, or love of home
and place, traditionally demonstrated by local communities (the Greek term oikos means
home or settlement), augmented by various technological innovations and adaptations.
Above all, Scruton stresses the importance for conservation of the fundamental conservative
insight that each generation holds the present world in trust, from the past into the future.
 Most recently, Scruton has turned his attention to religion,
publishing Our Church: A Personal History of the Church of England (2012), which focuses
very much on those aspects of the Anglican communion with which Scruton most clearly
identifies, especially its centuries-old institutional role as a bearer of English culture and
traditions, but also its music, architecture, art, and the English language, exemplified by the
profound influence of the King James Bible. A further example is The Face of God: The
Gifford Lectures (2012), which attempts to “reconcile the God of the philosophers with the
God who is worshipped and prayed to by the ordinary believer.” Typically for Scruton, he tries
to avoid abstract philosophical argumentation and insists instead that God’s presence in the
world is revealed through attention to the intimate inter-subjectivity of true human communion,
or, as he puts it: “God is understood not through metaphysical speculations concerning the
ground of being, but through communion with our fellow humans.” The intimacy of this is
captured through the image of “the Face”—of the other person and of God, with both of whom
we should be profoundly engaged if we are to realise our fullest humanity. The rootlessness,
alienation and depersonalisation of modern life prevent us from recognising this imperative
and make it so easy to deny God.
Modern atheism therefore involves not just the rejection of some metaphysical claims; it
involves a flight from a genuine encounter with the human and divine and the responsibility
and judgment that this entails. The price paid is metaphysical aloneness: “God is … avoidable
only by creating a void. This void opens before us when we destroy the face—not the human
face only, but also the face of the world. The godless void is what confronts us.” Scruton
believes ours is a culture “in full flight from the sacred,” in which we rage against our self-
inflicted fate but refuse to confront our own responsibility for our predicament. Consequently,
in the modern mind:
desecration becomes a kind of moral necessity—something that must be constantly
performed, and performed collectively, in order to destroy the things that stand in judgment
over us.
Scruton further pursues the sacred in The Soul of the World (2014), and attempts to defend
it from the faddish fascination with philosophical atheism that characterises Britain, Australia
and some other Western countries (although it lacks traction in the Third World, where
Christianity and Islam are booming). Once again drawing on insights offered by his
conservatism he inquires into the nature of intimacy, relatedness, inter-subjectivity, moral
intuitions and the capacity for aesthetic appreciation, and their implications for the sacred and
transcendent in a society besotted by an arrogant scientism unprepared to accept its own
profound limitations. One reviewer sees it as “a genuine ‘turning for home’ on the part of a
learned and deeply thoughtful man, who offers us hard-won insights as he fixes his gaze on
our final end.”
Indeed, these and future inquiries into ultimate questions concerning the sacred and the
transcendent may well be the most appropriate terminus of Scruton’s philosophical
investigations. If so, they will complete a near-fifty-year odyssey through the de-sacralised
wastelands of postmodernism, bestowed upon the world by the generation of the
cosseted soixante-huitards whose antics Scruton witnessed, reflected momentarily in the
disintegrating shopfront window of a Paris street. With hindsight, and in the light of the
trajectory of Scruton’s life’s work, this image appears to invoke an older, more traditional
reality that was visibly affronted by the events it witnessed and then fell victim to. Defiled, it
“gave up the ghost,” and was left in fragments. The image is one of iconoclasm, of the
deliberate disfigurement and destruction of the sacred.
At the outset of his career, Scruton witnessed the profanation and disenchantment of a
revered world, and the eclipse of a traditional order of things in which he had been at home
and whose value, for him, was beyond price. Left metaphysically homeless, he has ever since
explored the implications of this desecration and sought a way back home to the profound
truth it obscured, bequeathing to us the rich results of his quest.
Books by Roger Scruton may be found in The Imaginative Conservative Bookstore. This
essay originally appeared in Quadrant Online and is reprinted here with their gracious
permission.
http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2014/06/philosophy-roger-scruton.html