Five Years After Scruton

A philosopher whose time has not yet come?

The day of writing, 12^th January 2025, marks five years since the death of Sir Roger Scruton, who still deserves to be called the greatest conservative intellectual of modern times. In one of history’s fascinating coincidences, Edmund Burke was born on the same day as Scruton’s death, 291 years prior in Dublin. There exists a temptation, then, to see these two events as bookending the conservative tradition because no-one has inherited Scruton’s mantle as premier conservative thinker; Nigel Biggar, through his recent ennoblement, has been the only individual to make even a tentative attempt to claim it. Indeed, how could they succeed someone who wrote over fifty books and countless articles of an extraordinary breadth and depth? How could they possibly replicate this modern man of letters, whose achievements extended to penning novels and music, when writing of his nature appears increasingly surplus to requirements before those almighty screens which now rule most lives? How could others recover prominence for conservative ideas where Scruton’s decades of efforts failed?

Only the last of these questions is worth asking. Of course, the picture is very different in Eastern Europe, where his endeavours were celebrated during his life and in the years since. The same is true to various extents elsewhere on the continent. Many articles about Scruton since his death focus on this clear continental legacy, but either ignore or express brief puzzlement about his fate in Britain. There have been the eulogies, some of which might have emerged from a reflexive guilt at his unjust defenestration by the Conservatives, as well as the ever-displeased contrarians’ rejections. In recent months, two essays in The Critic, by Sebastian Milbank and Dan Hitchens respectively, have sought a more nuanced outlook by situating him within appropriate intellectual contexts, reflective of his slow natural passing from present memory to historical figure. Conservative politicians have begun to cite him more as an authority since their return to opposition in July, but his impact on the political reality in Britain remains minimal enough to declare he is a philosopher whose time has not yet come.

As he realised during his later decades, the Conservatives have held themselves back by somewhat habitual anti-intellectual tendencies, bordering on philistinism with the particularly unanchored pragmatism they pursued until recently in government. All conservatives should cautiously hope that the party has finally turned a corner in this respect, as the current leadership has indicated, whilst pushing them to continue on the path of constructive intellectual renewal. Nevertheless, Scruton directly addressed books to the need of conservatives and their party for a coherent intellectual defence, in turn aiming to broaden the reader’s horizons: A Political Philosophy (2006), as a gateway to several topics he expounded in other works; Conservatism (2017), as an introduction to the wider tradition of its political philosophy. His manifold works, though obviously stemming from an array of interests, do ultimately amount to a basis for the revitalisation of conservatism in several spheres of life. That he cared so deeply for civil society and culture, as sources of nourishment firmly outside of politics from which individuals can lead fulfilling lives, is indispensable to these ideas. His writings should not be imbibed and regurgitated verbatim as the solution, but the spirit they impart on the reader is in keeping with the best of the tradition that has been spurned in Britain and perverted beyond recognition in the United States. He invites the reader to understand it fully, beyond his own manifestly vast scope to all those thinkers back to Burke, just as conservatives wish to understand the world in all its flaws and intricacies rather than sweep it away.

One particular insight worth highlighting, given the preoccupation of the current Conservative leadership with first principles, is his profound observation of conservatism as a philosophy of love, one that refers at once to the particular and universal human truths. Scruton proposes the first instinct of a conservative is to find things to cherish and protect. From that positive foundation, which may also act as a refuge for brief respites, one can venture to solve problems and, in strengthening the society overall, serve one’s initial purposes of conserving the good. The motive force that is only driven by things wrong in the world, which he assigns to the contemporary ideologies of the left, reduces life to the mere pursuit of power and the destruction of things or groups as their simplest negation in the guise of rectification. Since his death, this has also become true of an emergent anti-conservative ideology on the right, their false uninterrogated assumptions about a lack of things to conserve leading them to acquire a very similar politics of destruction as their exclusive motivating approach. Conservatism, with Scruton’s help, thus sets itself apart from and arguably above the ideologies of modernity; such sources of self-confidence will be vital in the coming years.

So, five years after his death, Scruton’s time may soon arrive from the sheer scale of his contribution to British conservatism and the potential emergence of receptive political interlocutors. Codified in thousands of pages, he has brought the tradition with all its imagination, boldness and versatility into the twenty-first century, with many original insights to boot. Conservatives are fortunate to possess such a trove of wisdom but must always remember it was bequeathed without any intimations of finality. Yet the question of consciously selecting his intellectual successor, a slightly odd notion anyway, is far less pressing than those of applying conservative ideas to practical effect in confronting the issues of the present. As he emphasised in a 1994 article, collected in the posthumous volume Against the Tide, this must begin with the individual rescuing their conscience from cultural privations and despair: “we live only once, and that once is now. The choice lies before us, as it has lain before every human being in history, to live well or badly, to be virtuous or vicious, to love or to hate. And this is an individual choice, which depends on cultural conditions only obliquely, and which no other person can make in our stead.” Only then can one see the world, past, present and future, is knowable and lovable; that high culture, knowledge and beauty have not been wholly destroyed, just displaced from a position of primacy; that those warm human qualities now requiring direct protection from the excesses of the digital realm will be truly extinguished only with the extinction of the species. The validity of conservatism has scarcely diminished from mere ministerial neglect, but there is no easy solution to the work ahead of restoring its prominence within and beyond politics. Scruton’s writing, even in death, casts an invaluable light on the conservative tradition and its ideas, so it falls upon a new generation of conservatives to embrace their trusteeship and take them out into the world.