A Review of Roger Scruton’s How To Be a Conservative

Interest in the thought of Roger Scruton has caught a younger generation over the past year, following the passing of the British conservative philosopher. I first read his work Modern Philosophy by a “chance” perusal of the shelves at a Borders store back in 2004. I needed something to pass the time one afternoon and, noting the Penguin publisher symbol, anticipated some self-imposed torture of the driest and most condescending kind. Yet in each successive page, I thought, “Well, well, well, who is this guy pummeling the postmodernists like this?” Pleasantly surprised, but never purchased the book. A decade and a half passed without much thought to him, and now here was Scruton becoming one of the stars of a new generation of conservatives. In particular, young Reformed men, both classical and presuppositional in their orientation toward all things extra-biblical, were suddenly reading and discussing him; and, through him, perhaps for the first time, discovering Edmund Burke and Russell Kirk as well. 

That brings us to the present subject for review: Scruton’s “handbook” of sorts, How to Be a Conservative (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014). Being in between PhD semesters, I have little time for extracurricular reading, but as my son had joined the ranks in discovering Scruton and brought him up to me, I decided to have a look for myself. Just to keep things tidy, we will divide this review into four simple sections: namely, 1. some general observations of the book, 2. strong points, 3. weak points, and 4. lessons to advance in our own thinking. 

General Observations

The most obvious feature of Scruton’s conservatism is that which unites him to the “Burke-to-Kirk” lineage. That is the conviction that society is a relationship between the deceased, the living, and the unborn: a community of souls through time and in a place (cf. 20; 61; 93). This is an observation that may be fruitful in many ways, we might reason, but in what sense does it become an “ism”? How does it translate into either an ideology or a more modest approach to political matters? In order to spell that out, Scruton takes the approach to unpack (as witnessed by the titles to each chapter) “the truth” that can be found in a variety of other related isms: that is, the truth in nationalism, socialism, capitalism, liberalism, multiculturalism, environmentalism, internationalism, and finally, full circle, back to what encompasses the whole of the metal remaining from the alloys, once the comparative fires have removed the dross—conservatism. 

An early application at this point should not be missed. Ought we to expect the truth of Christianity to “encompass” the competing isms in a similar way? C. S. Lewis thought so. And while I think the way he expressed it leaves a lot to be desired, one might remember that chapter in Mere Christianity where he offered rebuke to those who would make a “Christian” world either more or less like this or that political program. Now I think Lewis made at least part of the same mistake so often made by pietists regarding political matters: namely, conflating political “programs” and “parties” with overarching philosophies. But the gist of it is that the ideal society would look a bit like this and a bit like that.

Now if Christianity is true, then (regardless of how much our own expectations may be fractional) there just will be a singular system of political truth that is most consonant with that largest set of truths that we are calling “Christianity,” and that is true quite apart from how well any of our finite minds conform to it.

This will at least be true in the mind of God. Our task is to gradually think God’s thoughts after him, to see them all as a coherent vision, and to allow ourselves to be corrected where they are not.

I mention that here because, though some readers may not take to Scruton’s approach of showing “the truth in” this or that fractional view, it actually serves to highlight that sense in which all truth must finally be cut from the same cloth. As I will show, the lesson to be gained for him is quite different. In commenting on how each truth can be “leaned on until it becomes a falsehood,” Scruton’s takeaway is that, “this transition from truth to falsehood occurs when the religious impulse displaces the political” (102). We will soon see how he gets there. But regardless of Scruton’s intentions, it is an opportunity to travel backwards from the error that “All rivers (of perspective) lead to the same ocean (of truth),” to the corrective that all such rivers of truth flow from and point back to one ultimate and original body of water. If there is a fractional truth, then there is a whole of which the fraction is true about. At any rate, we move on.  

Scruton channels Clinton Rossiter’s “thankless persuasion” in saying:

“Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created … the work of destruction is quick, easy and exhilarating; the work of creation slow, laborious and dull. That is one of the lessons of the twentieth century. It is also one reason why conservatives suffer such a disadvantage when it comes to public opinion. Their position is true but boring, that of their opposition exciting but false” (ix). 

In short, conservatism is the outlook of the virtuous adult who has the bad news business of pulling the weight and leading on in the real world of gravity and entropy and countless associated finitudes and curses. The radical outlook is, by contrast, that of both toddler and demon at once, lashing out against a world made up only of obstacles that fluctuate between unsatiated passions and pretentious, unaccountable ideals. If conservatism is “reactionary” it is precisely the reaction of having to explain every two seconds, “Well, no, that’s not the way that literally anything works.”

Well before I had even heard of Scruton, and as I was coming into Christian theology over two decades ago, I began to observe an insufficiency in the ultimate grounding of conservative principles. What I mean is in a decidedly secular grounding of tradition-apart-from-the-a-priori. What after all is the “secular” but this time and place? Our ethics must answer to this to be sure. But this time and place is not what grounds this time and place. And stretching backward to add more members of the same set of “time and place” does not settle the matter. This impulse is as much found in Hume and it is in the conservatism ever since, and even authors like Thomas Sowell, who give a more profound diagnosis all around, will have a foot in this language when hailing similar sentiments in the likes of Oliver Wendell Holmes and against the a priori pronouncements of the French Revolutionaries. Now libertarians will blame tradition as such for this. I do not agree with that assessment. On the other hand, I think we can all agree that not all traditions are equally valid. What then?

The moment we begin to mark a distinction between this tradition and that, we arrive at some a priori principle, some conception of natural law that transcends the blood and soil and pageantry of any particular procession of souls. We can agree with Kirk (and now Scruton) that tradition furnishes us with the more trustworthy medium for deriving the wisdom that forms law. That is, as a regular sourcebook, the time-tested wisdom of the ages is far more trustworthy than the self-proclaimed wisdom of the present mob (even a mob of self-identified experts). But as to an ultimate standard, this notion—what I have called “mere conservatism”—is at a loss. It cannot help us adjudicate between competing “wisdoms” when we are a dissident escaping one country, or left in the rubble of one that has utterly collapsed.

Strengths of How to Be a Conservative

Although I will have to grapple with a reductionism of his own, a value of Scruton’s approach is that he is able display, in narrative form, the reductionisms of modern ideology. For example, he has a term for man conceived merely as a rational calculator, whether in individual economic activity, or projected upon the origin of states, in Enlightenment contract theory, that is, homo oeconomicus (20, 22). This concept has the potential to view man from the perspective of his relation to his total stewardship and community. What has instead taken place is the materialistic molding of this man. This can happen from the Left or the Right, whether this is a reduction to the collective project or to the individual calculator. We are not merely detached valuators of commodities, but value is ultimately intrinsic of things that make up for home-building (119), rather than merely building: an extrinsic value.

He speaks of the “first personal plural” as a collective reality that is fundamental. No lasting social order, nor even a stable economic order, arises by immediate rational fiat. Justice and prosperity alike stretch through time and place, in a case of the collective and accumulating wisdom of the ages over the self-proclaimed insight of the innovator of each day. In fact the first person plural is always implied, and even in the case of the U.S. founding, where the ab initio status of an order is most readily ascribed, what does its document say up front? “We the People.”

This not only assumes distinction between “us” and all others, but Scruton adds, “the social contract makes sense only if future generations are included in it” (23). What makes any such arrangement work is piety toward the given, not a contract out of the deliberate. 

About those “isms,” first to nationalism. Many forget, or were never taught, that Modernity’s first nationalists were radical levelers. Scruton speaks of the new intelligentsia tasked with explaining the origin of the mayhem from Paris 1789 to Berlin 1945. In a word, it was nationalism. And that came to mean that national borders were to blame for all that destruction. The dark brilliance of these progeny of the instigators, settling in as “parents,” when it was their ideas that had set the thousand local bullies in motion to begin with. 

There is a difficulty of definition here. In our populist moment, the word “nationalism” can come to mean precisely the love of place and people that Scruton himself advocates. Wandering far off the reservation, it can be construed as “kinism,” so that people and place cannot accommodate other people in one’s place (even if they are altogether fond of it). “Nationalism, as an ideology, is dangerous in just the way that ideologies are dangerous. It occupies the space vacated by religion, and in doing so excites the true believer both to worship the national idea and to seek in it for what it cannot provide — the ultimate purpose of life, the way of redemption and the consolation for all our woes” (32). 

On to capitalism, even if one understands nothing of economic theory and little else about modern ideologies, this short statement by Scruton gives a simple entry point to Marx’s communism: “The theory is unbelievable, its predictions false, and its legacy appalling” (53).

The truth of capitalism, in brief, is that “private ownership and free exchange are necessary features of any large-scale economy in which people depend for their survival and prosperity on the activity of strangers” (54).

The comments on game theory and on Hayek’s inclusion of other social orders as part of an integrated whole game of “catallaxy” is a subject to be further explored, the social partaking diachronically and the economic synchronically. So, yes, there should be social constraints on a market, but — the libertarian may relax (or not) — only as spontaneously arising out of that unplanned marching forth of custom, laws, and morality.

In speaking of liberalism and its morphing nature, we are given a very helpful analysis of the problem of politicizing rights. Unlike in legislatures, where compromise can be achieved, in the courts, “a dispute over rights is a zero-sum game” (72). So if the concept of rights is expanded indefinitely, then not only is more of life politicized, but more of that politicized life pits one faction against another in that zero-sum game. When the concept of rights shifts from protecting the individual against violence to favoring one group against another, then all individuals have, in principle, forfeited their ground of protection against any violence (73-74).

He gives us a truth that would have been a truism in times past. Race and culture are not the same thing. Race is ambiguous anyway. It has been defined in many ways. But even if we accept the most basic definition, are we prepared to say that skin color equals idea-set? If so, what exactly is the difference between this and the racial determinism of the Third Reich? This is the irony of the new definition of racism: that it can only be believed by one who takes the old definition as a description of virtue. Scruton says, “The charge of ‘racism’ represents an attempt to turn the culture of repudiation in a religious direction … But it depends upon a deep untruth — the untruth that race and culture are the same thing, whereas in fact they have nothing to do with each other. There is no contradiction in the idea that Felix Mendelssohn was Jewish by race and German by culture … Nor is there any contradiction in saying that a single person belongs to two cultures” (90).

When it comes to race, the lunatics are truly running the asylum, and every sane person knows it, but has been afraid to say it for so long that they have forgotten that they know it, or what it is they know. 

Further, “Once we distinguish race and culture, the way is open to acknowledge that not all cultures are equally admirable, and that not all cultures can exist comfortably side by side” (90).

There must be a shared identity for there to be provisional compromise while respecting basic rights. Cultures that are decisively different from that of the country, and centralization of power from nation-states to international bodies, are both corrosive to that commonality. To the extent that the “national We” is opposed to the “international anti-We,” then Scruton’s rationale is sound. Internationalism and multiculturalism, as isolated isms, are designed specifically to erode the shared identity, and so to transfer loyalty from private association to the central state. 

Weaknesses of How to Be a Conservative

Scruton seemed to show early signs of not grasping at least some of the fundamental principles of classical economic theory and its empirical success: “I never swallowed in its entirety the free-market rhetoric of the Thatcherites” (7). Not to say one must endorse a particular iteration of it in the hands of a politician! He makes more understandable criticisms of Thatcher’s occasional neglect of culture. Later on his familiarity with Hayek and Mises comes through, and so it winds up being a mixed bag. At least some of the foundational rhetoric of the environmentalist movement, while only featuring as a passing clause or two, seems axiomatic to him, that of the “burden of our species” upon the planet (100). At the end of the day, one has read him rightly in discerning this mixture. He concludes, “that the role of the state is, or ought to be, both less than the socialists require, and more than the classical liberals permit” (135).

However the most irredeemable error in Scruton’s thinking is a thread that runs throughout, and is thus all the more unmistakable in terms of his meaning. It is not merely a private card he reveals that, “the conservative philosophy that I summarize in what follows in no way depends on the Christian faith” (17).

Rather, as an overarching principle, he dichotomizes the “religious social order” and “political social order,” in terms of source, function, and advantages (65). For Scruton, with the move from the former to the latter, justice replaces vengeance, and compromise replaces the absolute demands.

“Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord; but justice, says the city, is mine” (66). Incorrect! It was God who said both. And he did so precisely to replace mere human vengeance with a patience for final divine justice. So the Last Court is the Lord’s, and so is the earthly magistrate (Rom. 13:1-5; Matt. 21:17-22). 

It is in his chapter on nationalism that he first develops the idea. Civil law is national—not divine—and thus a sine qua non of civic order, as it “invokes no authority higher than the intangible assets that its people share” (34). Now I would think that for Scruton to deliver this lecture at Cannibal Hall would change things, but it is not clear on what basis Scruton would edit his notes even on the first few bites. I also do not think there would be a hall, what with all of the eating of the builders. But he presses on: “When God makes the laws, the laws become as mysterious as God is. When we make laws, and make them for our purposes, we can be certain what they mean” (35). At this point the old Soviet Dictionary and our IRS tax code leap off of our shelves to testify against us on the Day of Judgment. 

It is in his chapter on liberalism where perhaps the cardinal difference emerges between Scruton’s conservatism and that of Burke and Kirk: “law, too, emerges from our free transactions, not because it is imposed, but because it is implicit in our dealings” (67). He was summarizing Hayek’s argument in Law, Legislation, and Liberty. Fair enough—as far as it goes. But even Hayek was only speaking of human law. Scruton wants to draw two non-overlapping and impenetrable circles around those “religious” and “political” orders.

In other words, Scruton includes divine law in those a priori visions ruled out by the Burke-to-Kirk synthesis.

Now it is one thing to mean by this that what Thomas Müntzer says he heard from God, and what an activist Court pronounces all in an instant, are equally the pretensions of madmen; but it is another thing to exclude (a priori, oneself—irony sold separately) the substantial unity of the Sixth and Eighth Commandments, on the one hand, and constitutional protections of life and property, on the other. In short, Scruton turns St. Thomas on his head in pitting human law against divine law.

His best arguments, while valid and sound, must remain pragmatic. For instance, “Unless the ‘contract between the living’ can be phrased in such a way that the dead and the unborn are a part of it, it becomes a contract to appropriate the earth’s resources for the benefit of its temporary residents” (24). That is true and that is important, but suppose I reply, “What of it?” In his chapter on multiculturalism, it may appear that he is willing to acknowledge this, but alas, he finds refuge yet again in the temporal-universal: “Political order, in short, requires cultural unity, something that politics itself can never provide” (80). True again, but can the cultural unity glued together by present politics do any better?

The American order may have seemed for many an exception, “a nation created by politics,” or a “civic culture,” where “social membership has been freed from religious affiliation, from racial, ethnic and kinship ties, and from the ‘rites of passage’ whereby communities lay claim to the souls of their members, by guarding them against the pollution of other customs and other tribes” (81). It was indeed an unprecedented “experiment,” which the author leaves alone in terms of whether or not it is succeeding. 

Scruton rightly aims a republic at mitigating political factions, and showing how democracy was a means—a dangerous means—to the end of republican order. However, his definition of a republic is so deficient as to make even its practical difference from a democracy negligible.

He calls a republic “a system of representational offices filled by citizens held answerable to those who elected them” (68). And that it is. But any democratic socialist will claim to value the same. What then? Only that one will have to appeal to a law above the laws of men, which is precisely what Scruton has ruled out.

When Scruton finally does get around to talking about natural rights, he traces their origin to twin pillars that Locke helpfully combined: 1. Natural law and 2. Common law. From the first, one derives a universal standard against which all particular legal systems can be judged; from the second, it is assumed “that law exists to protect the individual from arbitrary power” (69). Scruton realizes that the concept of natural law must be defined. There are two options: according to moral judgment, or according to maintaining consensual society. In keeping with his dichotomy between religious and political orders, he answers in the latter. He traces his lineage here to Locke and cites Mill in support (76-77). What matters is “that our principles are not, as such, enforceable by law” (77). But what of that moral principle—and the countless others Scruton has set forth even for non-negotiables of bare minimum liberal order?

If anyone doubts my analysis here, they may feel free to take Mr. Scruton’s word for it, as he explicitly distances himself from Kirk and other American conservatives who root their position in natural law, and thus on “theological foundations” (see the second paragraph and footnote on page 140).

Margin Notes: Advancing from Scruton

Society minus the sacred is a form without its Form. Here Scruton could have even taken Plato more seriously if the Bible is too steep of a hill. In setting the political order wholly against the religious order, at least insofar as the one is consensual law and the other is not, we saw that Scruton is unable to ground the political instances in a sufficient trans-political form. So, the comprehension of social points in that enduring “We” — “past we, present we, future we” — what is the “form” that gives unity to the diversity of first person plurals? 

The local without localism is a value without a commitment. Scruton argues that the real “love of the oikos” is not reducible to homo oeconomicus, but encompasses persons and networks and even environments. Toward this fabric of persons and things, one must “assign an intrinsic, rather than an instrumental, value” (25). If that sounds like Marx’s angst over reducing the worker to a commodity, Scrunton is pointing to the fact that a Smithian may be equally guilty of a commodification of all things. Moving beyond this is “what conservatism is about,” that is, “putting the oikos back into the oikonomia” (25). When we come to his chapter on the environment, we get a fuller sense of what he means by a holistic agreement between the people of a physical setting and economic and environmental relations. 

Centralization must be resisted even in solutions to problems like pollution. That is true within the borders of nations and in ceding national sovereignty to globalist claims, since in both the bureaucratic plans violate those two classic principles of efficiency: the party that 1. possesses no direct expertise nor 2. bears any direct cost for failure is the least competent to be making the decision. What is true in the setting of prices and thus allocating of resources, is also true of the conservation of resources. All well and good. But was Scruton prepared, in all that he would conserve, to cut ties with the more distant bureaucratic mob even if it means a diminished pie that can call itself a “nation”?

The trouble with further centralization for Scruton is restricted to whether the order emerges from “pre-political ties” (105). Hence global governance is to be resisted because of this utopianism. Indeed. But this is not the only observation that conservatism has made about centralization.

The tendency of the flow of power in any central state, whether the “ties” of the terrain it covers were pre-political at one time or not, is an object with a nature. People of my kin can become devils in an instant, and the scenery shared with the past is no infallible protection against the immutable laws of collective sloth. 

Therein lies the fundamental weakness of modern conservatism, which is (at its best) mere conservatism. It fails to conserve anything in practice because it first fails in theory to conserve what is most essential over and above what is the outer shell. If any man is asked what he would take from his burning house should he only have one trip out the door to make, all would answer that his own wife and children would be in his arms. He may protest the taking of the garden and (in my case) the library, in the event of a gradual fire where the arsonists can be given a fair fight. But cultural pyromaniacs didn’t get that name by fighting fair, and Scruton and his ilk are plagued with the misplaced decency of trying to reason with the unreasonable, even while rightly analyzing that it is precisely reason that has been in their crosshairs for some time. 

What revolutionaries can convince the masses of and what they can use law enforcement for are two different things. Conservatives generally understand the inverse relationship between the radical’s self-professing leadership and the working class’s real life adherence. Their brains usually turn off at the moment that this triumphant observation is made. For instance, Scruton rightly reminds us that “the [ultimate class] war has broken out only where intellectuals have been able to foment it — as Lenin did in Russia and Mao in China, neither of which countries possessed a real urban working class” (44). A wonderfully often neglected point! 

The typical conservative takeaway from this history lesson is represented in Scrunton’s next words:

“The wars of the twentieth century brought home the fundamental truth that people will fight for their country and unite in its defence, but will seldom fight for their class, even when the intellectuals are egging them on” (45).

True again — and a very decisive social factor back in 1918 and 1945. Not so much by 2020. Locked down last year, inside their houses, under the biggest political fraud in world history, perhaps more people (though apparently not those reading Scruton with over-exuberance) now realized that the command of a working class mob was quite irrelevant. The military and police themselves will do the radical’s bidding, as the interests of the revolution have already captured all of the mechanisms of the State.

What kind of anti-statism? I close with some thoughts that can have no resolution in so small a space. The reactions and options among the new “young right” (What difference does it make what we call it, since we have all just been declared White Nationalist Terrorists by the Department of Justice?) — these alternatives are very much undefined at this point. The post-war conservative movement was already dead by the mid-90s. Neo-Cons never earned anything but disdain among the young. After 2020, one is as likely to run into as many self-professing Monarchists and Anarchists as they are Libertarians and Conservatives among 18 to 30 year old Christian males in America. Such is the moment of anticipating the collapse of the Republic.

What Scruton offers is one pathway to a kind of conservatism that has withstood the test of time partly by being adaptable even to chaotic times. One well-worn scenario is a new feudalism, in which regional cultures must negotiate political and economic orders accordingly. 

Benjamin Disreali saw the importance of defending the free market, in principle, from socialism; but he also saw that this must be done in the traditional conservative way. This led to his “feudal principle,” which was that, “The one who enjoys property is also accountable for it, and in particular accountable to those upon whom otherwise it might otherwise impose a burden. He has responsibilities toward the less fortunate, towards the unborn, and towards the inheritance in which we all have a stake” (61). It may be that regions are too multicultural themselves due to the transitory nature of suburban life. We are all thrown together in a salad too mixed to be called any culture. But it may also be that we will soon have no choice but to learn to negotiate such a common culture out of the fragments. For many, the “think and act locally” model seems perfectly compatible with Scruton’s vision. Whatever points we may disagree with, we must at least be familiar with it.