I had bought Roger Scruton’s Conservatism a while back, and offered it to a friend interested in Scruton. But when I checked through the book I’m not sure if I ever read it!
So I wrote a summary of the book, and this is a summary of the summary.
In Scruton’s view conservatism has always been a response to the latest enthusiasm of the left. It is, I would say, like George Eliot’s Mr. Brooke in Middlemarch. He’s in favor of Reform, but independent about it. “I don't want to go too far.”
Conservatism got its start in the Enlightenment and before the French Revolution with men like Hooker, Hobbes, Locke and Montesquieu. Also, Blackstone, Hume, and Dr. Johnson. They were “creating a conservatism… as an attempt to hold on to the values of kinship and religion in communities that were being reorganized by a purely political law.”
In consequence,
Liberals saw political order as issuing from individual liberty; conservatives saw individual liberty issuing from political order... The question of which comes first, liberty or order, was to divide liberals from conservatives for the next two hundred years.
Conservatives followed the American Revolution, liberals the French Revolution. Thus Jefferson and the US Constitution raised the question “about safeguarding liberty against the growth of government.” The French "Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen" was impeccably liberal. But the American Bill of Rights was marked by the culture of the common law. Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Recent Revolution in France
developed a complex, unsystematic but highly illuminating account of custom, tradition, and civil association... [recognizing] that freedom is always in jeopardy and must be protected by the law.
And the “little platoons.”
Adam Smith, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations expressed a vision central to conservatism. He saw the foundation of human community in a "mutual sympathy of sentiments" and "provided the first serious defence of the market economy from philosophical principles."
Enter the Germans. Kant was liberal, centering on the freely choosing individual, and providing no special place for customs and traditions. Hegel saw “the tension and conflict between... the family and civil society... and the resolution of this conflict in the state".
Scruton notes the significant contribution of Tocqueville, who saw that the culture of equality destroys the faith in the social order and confines individuals "within the solitude of their hearts" unless the "little platoons" recreate "long-standing and genial hierarchies." In The Old Regime and the French Revolution Tocqueville argued that revolutions do not prompt change but are a response to change.
The Industrial Revolution and the rise of the working class sparked social theories explaining this movement. They came together in the socialist movement so that by 1900,
it was no longer against liberalism that conservatism was defining itself, but against socialism, and in particular against the socialist conception of the state.
British conservative writers began to focus on culture, and the place of Christianity in civil society. Britons from Coleridge to Ruskin to Matthew Arnold to T.S. Eliot and F.R. Leavis and the Southern Agrarians" in the US were opposed to morality and law as "mathematical puzzles, to be solved by calculation". Scruton invokes T.S. Eliot to say that
in every sphere tradition is a process of continuous adaptation of the old to the new and the new to the old.
In Germany Herder proposed a division between Civilization and its rational calculation and Culture that unites humans in "mutual attachment... language, custom, folk tales, and folk religion." Thus the Brother Grimm and German nationalism as a shared cultural identity in a single nation state.
In the US cultural conservatism featured Thoreau who idealized the wilderness in Walden and the Southern Agrarians and their “culture of the soil". The movement produced Allen Tate, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor and Robert Penn Warren and others.
After World War II conservatism became more specifically anti-socialist, with Leo Strauss, a refugee from Nazism, promoting conservatism, constitutionalism and a deep reading of the classics. Hayek developed the idea of a spontaneous order, guided by the price system and the common law rather than top-down planning. Michael Oakeshott wrote that top-down control leads to the destruction of compromise and free association. James Burnham in The Managerial Elite accused socialism of the faults that the Marxists had attributed to capitalism and creating a managerial elite.
George Orwell described himself as a socialist, but wrote Nineteen Eight-four to teach us about Newspeak, thoughtcrime and doublethink. He prophesied today’s war on racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, etc. The question of how to push back against political correctness has become central to conservatism.
In Britain it has been almost impossible for native Brits to espouse a conservative philosophy, so immigrants like Iraqi Jew Elie Kedourie, Peter Bauer and Kenneth Minogue have stepped in.
In America for decades after World War II conservatism was defined by William F. Buckley and Russell Kirk at National Review and Modern Age. And there was Russian emigrée Ayn Rand to celebrate the Nietzschean Úbermensch.
In the 1970s the conservative and libertarian standpoints merged into a New Right and Reagan-Thatcher politics. It featured Milton Friedman and his Capitalism and Freedom and James M. Buchanan and The Calculus of Consent. But Reagan-Thatcher became identified with globalism so thinkers like Scruton developed a movement and a magazine Salisbury Review
to protect what matters, both from subversion by the socialist cult of equality and from dissolution under the impact of global forces, market forces included.
And conservatism is a push back against Islamism. Today, national loyalty and attachment to the land we share is threatened by Islamist intransigence, and also by the Left for which the defense of our inheritance is racist or xenophobic.
To repeat: conservatism has become the champion of Western civilization against its enemies: political correctness, and Islamic religious extremism.
Scruton concludes by saying that
My own view is that conservatism will be a necessary ingredient in any solution to the emerging problem of today, and that the tradition of thinking that I have outlined in this book should therefore be part of the education of all politicians everywhere.