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January 8, 2018|Antonin Scalia, Conservatism, Constitutionalism, culture, ideas in profile, Ordered Liberty, permanent things, Richard Posner, Roger Scruton

Sir Roger to the Rescue

by Stephen Presser|8 Comments

Those of us who read for a living read a lot, and we rarely come across a work that is, simply stated, dazzling and delightful.  Even rarer is one dazzling, delightful, deep and wise, but Roger Scruton’s Conservatism, is just such a book.  Here, in an astonishingly short compass (less than one hundred and fifty pages of text), is a comprehensive history of western conservative thought, from the beginnings in Aristotle and Aquinas, through the French and Industrial Revolutions, right up to the present, and conservative thought not just in America and Britain, but in Continental Europe as well. The book is part of Profile Books’s series “Ideas in Profile,” subtitled “Small Introductions to Big Topics,” an apt rubric for what we have here.

Sir Roger Vernon Scruton, fellow of the British Academy, fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, knighted in 2016, is the author of more than 50 books on political and religious philosophy, art, sexuality, and literature.  For most of his career Scruton was an English academic, and a regular writer for the British popular press. Why, though, should readers of this blog — those devoted to Law and Liberty in the United States — care what England’s most visible and brave man of the Right has to say?  He deserves our attention because Scruton makes clear and plain, as few have, that the defense of ordered liberty and the rule of law in our country (and similar battles in England and on the Continent) are the primary concern of conservatives here and abroad, and, if we fail to listen to them, what we cherish is likely to be lost.

Scruton’s shimmering little book will be invaluable in the hands of undergraduates and law students, and will serve as a primer (and, for the diligent, a lifetime reading list) for the key works of conservatives ranging from Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville all the way up to William F. Buckley, Russell Kirk, and Scruton himself, and including such lesser known but crucial authors as Richard Weaver, Joseph de Maistre, Friedrich von Hayek, Joseph A. Schumpeter, Michael Oakeshott, Whittaker Chambers, and many, many others.

It is with, however, the practicing professionals and a concerned citizenry that Scruton ought to have his greatest and most valuable impact. Thus, the galaxy of talent commented on by Scruton is not simply a panorama of heroes, it is, rather, the assembling of a set of tools for the construction of a means of preserving the United States Constitution (which Scruton quite rightly regards as the one of the preeminent achievements of Conservatism) and the liberties it guarantees against the destructive forces which now challenge it.  For Scruton, these destructive forces are the ideas of the modern Left, the progressives and socialists, now proceeding under the banners of political correctness and multiculturalism.  Scruton argues that if these notions were allowed to govern us (and they did for eight years in the last administration), they would lead to wholesale redistribution of resources, and, quite possibly, a levelling of distinctions which would eventually turn this country into a kind of dystopia forecast by George Orwell.

Equally alarming for Scruton is the secular ideology which has triumphed in both the American and British Universities, and, indeed, in most of American and British politics. While he doesn’t exactly invoke this particular phrase, the thrust of Scruton’s thought is quite similar to that of the Hamiltonian Federalists, who, in their struggle with the Jeffersonians (the party of the Left in their day), maintained that there could be no order without law, no law without morality, and no morality without religion. In this the Federalists were simply carrying on the English common law tradition, as explained in Blackstone, and so important to many early American judges, that underscored the connection between gospel morality and the law.

Scruton similarly stresses the connection of law and morality with religion, and adds to that the cultural benefits flowing from a consciousness of national character and tradition. The one great American conservative Scruton curiously does not mention, Antonin Scalia, the great champion of textualism, originalism, and tradition, would have understood and appreciated what Scruton seeks to do, and would have applauded the manner in which Scruton disposes of the proponents of judicial legislation and the “living constitution.”

Anyone sympathetic to the jurisprudence of Scalia, will be immediately attracted to what Scruton has to say, and, indeed, delighted to discover that for Scruton, and for thoughtful English and American conservatives, the English Constitution and the English Common Law of which it is a crucial part furnishes the substance of an enduring political program. Scruton’s book, then, is not simply a review for scholars and students, but is also a handbook for the practicing politician and voter, and a reminder that the task of government ought to be to preserve and protect liberty, property and rights, and not to reconstitute society through the redistribution of resources. When Newt Gingrich and his band of Republican would-be reformers achieved control of the Congress in 1994 he famously recommended that they read Tocqueville to gain a better sense of what their responsibilities were and how they might best preserve democracy in America by implementing conservative principles of governance. The need for enlightened statesmanship in our era is, if possible, even greater, and, in an ideal polity, President Trump would purchase and send copies of this little Scruton volume to all the members of the House and Senate, and as many agency and executive branch officials as possible.

Scruton is now 73, and these mature reflections of his also emphasize that while the task for conservatives in our time is to contribute to the preservation of our heritage of law and liberty, he also demonstrates, as he has in many other works, that the business of conservatives ought also to be to preserve our culture. For this preservation to take place, he understands (and so should we), it is necessary to resist the blandishments of the multiculturalists, and to make sure that we do not lose the insights into the human condition offered by our greatest novelists, poets, critics, and artists.

Accordingly, there is a chapter on “Cultural Conservatism,” an exploration of Western Literature, and, in particular, the writings of John Bunyan, François-René de Chateaubriand, William Wordsworth, D.H. Lawrence, John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, Benjamin Disraeli (as a novelist as well as a Conservative politician), T.S. Eliot, G.K. Chesterton, and C.S. Lewis.  Scruton thus reminds us of something known to the great 19th century American lawyers (and to a select few in our time, like Scalia and like Richard Posner) that literature informs and strengthens politics and even law. Scruton takes care to demonstrate that our literary tradition, like our political tradition, has been, in its highest and best use, devoted to the preservation of Christian morality and revealed truth. In particular the best elements of the tradition have focused on the two essential propositions of Christian thought: that we should learn to love and honor God and to love our neighbors as ourselves.

Working with these insights, Scruton ends this extraordinarily informative and extraordinarily provocative volume with a prescription for how conservatives ought to move forward at this time of challenge not only from the progressives and the politically correct, but from immigration and Islamic radicalism. In a fascinating set of suggestions which can only be hinted at here, Scruton maintains that preserving our tradition in our time ought to be about promoting nationalism, the preservation of national character. Scruton here unintentionally echoes the recently-expressed notion by Donald Trump that while he wanted to make America great again, he thought it ought to be the enterprise of other countries to do precisely the same, but according to their particular traditions. It is the fragmentation of our society that ought most to be feared, Scruton maintains, and thus the multiculturalism and “identity politics” of the progressives and the demand for subordination of individual thought and national identity and the intolerance of other religious traditions in Muslim extremism must be resisted by conservatives everywhere.

Perhaps Scruton is a bit too optimistic about bringing everyone around to the enduring insights of traditional Western Christianity, and perhaps his belief that even Muslim immigrants to Western countries can live peaceably and learn to partake of the historic national traditions and culture of the nations in which they settle will be difficult to accept, but the alternatives to Scruton’s optimism are discord and despair. It is fashionable in American universities, and has been since the early seventies, to disparage the suggestion that there are any “permanent things” or “timeless truths.” A work such as this slim volume, if widely circulated, as it should be, has the potential strikingly to remedy our failures to accept the possibility of an enduring vision of the good, the true, and the divine.

Stephen Presser

Stephen B. Presser is the Raoul Berger Professor of Legal History Emeritus at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, and the author of Law Professors: Three Centuries of Shaping American Law (West Academic, 2017), recently reviewed in these pages.

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Comments

  1. Mark Pulliam says

    January 8, 2018 at 12:36 pm

    Bravo! More from Professor Presser!

    Reply
  2. Devin Watkins says

    January 8, 2018 at 1:53 pm

    You really claim the “Jeffersonians” were “the party of the Left in their day”? Alexander Hamliton and the Federalists were the party of big government. For instance, Alexander Hamilton on June 18, 1787 at the constitutional convention argued for an elected king who would serve a life term. The Federalists were strong supporters of the Alien and Sedition Acts which criminalized criticism of the government. The Federalists were big supporters of tariffs and economic protectionism. Look at Hamilton’s board reading of the necessary and proper clause, the commerce clause and other areas and you will see big government advocated all over the place.

    Meanwhile the “Jeffersonians” who called themselves “republicans” believed in state’s rights and opposed a large expansive federal government. The Jeffersonians pursued free market ideas. It was Jefferson who wrote the Declaration of Independence with its famous words “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” It was also the Jeffersonians who won the hearts and minds of the American people, with 82% in the house/71% in the senate in 1804 and as high as 89% in the house/94% in the senate in 1822. The Federalists were so opposed by the American people that the party dissolved.

    It is also not true that the Jeffersonians were anti-religious, for instance Thomas Jefferson himself said: “And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath?” Or Samuel Adams, another Jeffersonian part of his party, wrote that “Religion and good morals are the only solid foundation of public liberty and happiness.”

    I don’t count George Washington as a Federalist (he was friends of both groups), and so the only President ever elected that was a Federalist was John Adams. Is he really the model of conservatism? This is someone who even Alexander Hamilton described as “emotionally unstable, given to impulsive and irrational decisions, unable to coexist with his closest advisers, and generally unfit to be president.”

    Reply
    • EK says

      January 10, 2018 at 2:00 pm

      Nicely put.

      In 1796 the division was between populist republicans and elitist whigs. Adams was the closest thing the Federalists had to a populist republican so they ran him. He won but much like Trump at the moment, Adams found himself forced to make difficult decisions between reform and stability. Almost invariably, Adams made the wrong choice and that cost him popular support outside of New England.

      I think you have to number Washington amongst the Federalists since his only original idea was a hereditary society of officers from the Revolutionary War. That enraged the veterans of the war and was consistent with his dispicable treatment of the militia and impressed men under his command, like Daniel Morgan and Daniel Shays, who actually fought the war. Otherwise Washington was, I think, merely Hamilton’s sock puppet.

      Reply
  3. Paul Binotto says

    January 8, 2018 at 3:33 pm

    Interesting review!

    Reply
  4. Jack says

    January 8, 2018 at 5:44 pm

    Would’ve been more interested in the book if you’d bother to praise it.

    Reply
  5. gabe says

    January 8, 2018 at 7:09 pm

    Scruton provides, to my mind, a solid and foundational counter to all the present day “anti-nationalists” who would relegate nationalism to a long list of political maladies to be studiously avoided.

    Roger and out!!!!!

    Reply
  6. timothy says

    January 8, 2018 at 9:59 pm

    I have not yet read “Conservatism” but will do so because 1) it’s by Roger Scruton and 2) it’s favorably reviewed and highly recommended by a prescient scholar and talented writer, Professor Emeritus Stephen Presser (of my LS alma mater:)

    In commenting on Scruton’s article, “Tradition, Culture and Citizenship,” recently printed by Liberty and Law I said the following:

    “Tradition, Culture, and Citizenship” is a typically-excellent Scruton cultural essay, a cornucopia of philosophically-reasoned, politically-prescient, cultural insight expressed with literary grace and sensitivity to the truth of artistic beauty.”

    “Of those living writers in the Anglo-American common cultural tradition who both embody the high culture (what Scruton calls “the self-conscious and reflective part of the common culture”) and possess a broad capacity to reach and teach the common culture in the hopes of changing the popular culture (and thereby saving the common culture) three men are foremost: Thomas Sowell for his grasp of the relationship among economics, politics and common culture; Victor Davis Hanson for his grasp of the relationship among history, politics and common culture; and Roger Scruton for his grasp of the relationship among philosophy, art, politics and common culture. ”

    If Presser is to be believed (and who among those who have benefited from his works would doubt him?) with “Conservatism” Scruton has, again, confirmed our accolades.

    Reply

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