Roger Scruton has been the primary articulator of a considered, philosophical conservatism for over thirty years. It is a job he inherited pretty much by accident when he was invited by a liberal colleague (Ted Honderich) to produce a defence of “the” conservative position, as a way of sort of evening up the conceptual battleground within political philosophy (the academic  disciplines being then, as now, overcrowded with liberals).

There is much in Scruton’s conservatism that those on the American right might not embrace. American conservatism tends to take as a starting point a rejection of the emphasis of outcome over process. For American conservative thinkers justice resides not within some settled, equal political dispensation; rather it is to be found within the various transactions that take place prior to any such settled dispensation. Assuming there ever is a “settled” political dispensation.

 Liberalism proposes a contractarian view of the just society: the just society is the one that the rational citizen would consent to be a part of. Against this, Scruton argues that two concepts are primary: those of allegiance and obligation. All states exercise power over their subjects, but the legitimate state is one in which that power has been transformed into allegiance. Further, he recognises that there are forms of obligation that lack the character of the contract: the obligation of family is different from that of party: you can explain the latter in terms of a contract, but not the former. The obligations of family are more basic than those obligations generated as the outcome of a contract: as are the obligations of citizenship. The liberal model of the just society is therefore misconceived.

Conservatism, done properly, is anti-theoretical in character. The conservative will value the concrete here-and-now over the abstract. She is welcoming of those changes that reinforce what has been, and she is suspicious of those changes that propose an unnecessary leap into the unknown. It is therefore an irony that Scruton’s body of work has a deeply unifying theme. His range of philosophical reference is more than impressive and his aim is to reinstate the primacy of culture as an object of knowledge. This might seem trivial until you reflect on the course philosophy has taken over the last century or so. No longer interested in serving as a critical prism through which to examine the world, philosophy has too often ended up talking about itself. The method, once the means, is now the end in itself. Scruton’s overarching attempt has been to relegate the philosophical method to the status of a means to understand the human experience. Thus in his earlier books on aesthetics and on the nature of sexual desire, Scruton has developed theories of the mind in ways that illuminate genuine personal and cultural experiences (whilst at the same time doing genuine work in the philosophy of mind, incidentally).

As mentioned, Scruton became a more or less accidental ambassador for conservatism, but this was never enough to earn the forgiveness of the (liberal) academic establishment (whose “liberalism” is merely nominal and self-conferred) and he retired early from full-time university life in order to tend to his farm in Wiltshire. He remains both prolific and under-appreciated. At least for now.