But Roger also held that one naturally and rightly has a special love for, and duties toward, members of one’s family, tradition of faith, local community and region, and fellow citizens. Indeed, Roger was the leading philosophical defender of love of home and one’s own, what he called “oikophilia.” Of course, as a humanist and Christian he recognized duties to all of humanity - even duties of love (understood as being less about feeling than about willing): All are brothers and sisters under the fatherhood of God, who made us all in his own image.
We do not come into the world as bare individuals who can develop an identity entirely from scratch.
Nothing was more fundamental to his moral and political thought than the dignity of the human person but he understood that to flourish, persons need relationships, beginning with the family.Ĭentral to Roger’s disagreement with his more libertarian allies was his belief in unchosen (and in that sense “natural”) obligations - duties we have simply by virtue of being human and born into a certain family, community, or nation. But that should not obscure a profound intellectual-moral difference: Roger rejected “individualism” in any serious sense. Roger was willing at times to ally himself with classical liberals, and even Austrian-school libertarians in the struggle against Communism, bravely leading seminars and building underground institutions in Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe. Here, Roger joined the iconic American neoconservative Irving Kristol in giving capitalism only “two cheers” - perhaps no more than one and three-quarters. Liberty, while important, was for him only one important value among others like community and solidarity, order and decency, honor and faith.Īnd so he thought a variety of regulations may be needed, and therefore justified, to protect persons and valuable institutions of civil society - what Edmund Burke (and Roger was nothing if not a Burkean) called “the little platoons” that should play the lead role in promoting health, education and welfare, and in forming new generations in the virtues people need to thrive and contribute to society.
ROGER SCRUTON FREE
Second, though Roger believed in market mechanisms and fervently opposed central planning and what he saw as a dependency-inducing welfare state, he denied that the outcomes of free exchanges are automatically just. In this respect, he thought, it shared an error with its great foe, Marxism. Yet Roger was far from fully on board with the economic philosophy of the British Tories or the American Republicans (or the mainstream of the Anglo-American conservative movement).įirst, he believed that the free-market enthusiasm of Margaret Thatcher and Milton Friedman made economic policy too central, relying on it too much to solve social problems and shape society. So he found little to like in the Labour Party of his native Britain, even in the Tony Blair era, or in the Democratic Party in the United States, even before its leftward lurch in the 21st century.
Like conservatives of all descriptions, Roger loathed and opposed Communism, which he regarded as a soul-destroying abomination (and not just as a failed promise of economic prosperity), and all forms of socialism. To do so will show the important ways in which Roger defied stereotypes. Many of his philosophical views can truthfully be labeled “conservative.” But to honor the truth in full, it is necessary to explain, with respect to any particular view Roger held, the sense in which it was conservative. It’s true that he was a conservative it’s also true that he was a philosopher. Roger was widely known as a “conservative philosopher”- indeed, the most important Anglo-American conservative thinker of his generation. I learned an enormous amount from reading his work and even more from our conversations. Although we represented different philosophical schools - Roger leaning in a Kantian direction, I being a dyed-in-the-wool Aristotelian - our interests and ultimate conclusions often overlapped.
Sir Roger Scruton, who died this month at age 75, was a longstanding and dear friend of mine.
0 kommentar(er)
