Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition

Roger Scruton, “Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition,” Profile Books, 2017, 155 pp.

I think my political inclinations are fiscally conservative and socially liberal.  I should additionally add--significantly less mean than what I see on the news; tabloids at the grocery store;  as well as on Facebook, Twitter, etc.  So, I continue to search for a definition that describes my position, whether fiscally or social,  and that search led me to this book--solely because of its title.  The book is very hard to read but I struggled through.  I think some of the best concepts are captured in my notes and will save readers the tedium of actually reading the book.

In Conservatism, Roger Scruton offers the reader an invitation into the world of political philosophy by explaining the history and evolution of the conservative movement over the centuries.  He discusses the conservative ideology's perspective on civil society, the rule of law, freedom, morality, property, rights, and the role of the state. In a time when many claim that conservatives lack a unified intellectual belief system, this book, I believe unintentionally, gives a clear description of conservatism that today can only be found with the Never-Trumpers,

Scruton analyzes the origins and development of conservatism through the philosophies and thoughts of John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith, and Milton Friedman, among others. He points out how conservative ideas have influenced the political sector through the careers of a diverse cast of politicians, such as Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Disraeli, Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher. He also takes a close look at the changing relationship between conservative politics, capitalism, and free markets in both the UK and the US. This clear, incisive guide is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand Western politics and policies, now and over the last three centuries.

At the core of “Conservatism” is the idea that human beings live naturally together in communities and that we “desire to sustain the networks of familiarity and trust on which a community depends for its longevity.” We may be rational beings capable of planning our future, but we also need customs and institutions to ground and sustain us over time.

My Notes:

Pg. 1.  Neither liberals nor conservatives were prepared for the internet and accompanying social media which have disrupted the political process, bypassing the official filters (read editors and fact checkers) in order to go straight to the target, which is a one-click response on a smartphone.  Nor should we be surprised that the separation of powers has become the antagonism of powers, with the branches of government competing for the high ground of political influence, and that we are getting people previously unimaginable as the holders of high office. 

Pg. 2:  Conservatism is not, by nature, an international cause.  It takes its character from local questions and the loves and suspicions that thrive in specific places and times.  For conservatives, all disputes over law, liberty, and justice are addressed to a historic and existing community, the “WE”.  The root of politics, they believe, is settlement—the motive in human beings that binds them to the place, the customs, the history and the people that are theirs.  They adapt to change in the name of continuity, in order to conserve what we are and what we have. 

For liberals, on the other hand, it is not the specifics of our local history and acquired obligations that should govern our political behavior, but the universal ideals of the Enlightenment.  They argue that the ‘we’ of politics is never stable, and all boundaries are in essence negotiable. 

Pg. 11:  All three forms of society – tribal, religious, and political – can be witnessed in the world today, though it was the emergence of political order that was the original inspiration for modern conservatism. On one reading of events, indeed, conservatism arose as an attempt to hold on to the values of kinship and religion in communities that were being reorganized by a purely political law.

Pg. 12:  The most important input into conservative thinking is the desire to sustain the networks of familiarity and trust on which a community depends for its longevity. Conservatism is what its name says it is: the attempt to conserve the community that we have in all matters that ensure our community’s long term survival.

Pg. 17:  The growing conflict between church and state at the Reformation, and the increasing emphasis on natural law as setting limits to the sovereign power, were powerful factors in displacing the medieval idea, that legitimacy flows downwards from the sovereign to the subject, and replacing it with the liberal view, that legitimacy flows upwards from the people to the sovereign power.

Pg. 20f:  It was from Harrington, Locke, and Montesquieu that the idea of separation of powers came about that was to have a radical influence on both liberal and conservative thinking.  American Founders, who framed their constitution along the lies those thinkers suggested – with executive power vested in the president, legislative power in Congress and judicial power in the Supreme Court. 

Pg. 55:  The relation between liberalism and conservatism is one of symbiosis.  Liberalism makes sense only in the social context that conservatism defends.  But liberals and conservatives are temperamentally quite distinct.  Liberals naturally rebel, conservatives naturally obey.  Destroy the culture of obedience, conservatives believe, so that rights are declared but duties forgotten, and the result is the totalitarian terror that followed the French Revolution.  The same dialectical relation between liberalism and conservatism was played out in the political writings of Kant (1774 – 1804) and Hegel (1770 – 1831).  Kant made the freely choosing individual the very center of his world view.  He makes no special place for customs and traditions. 

Pg. 86:  Many accuse conservatism of being no more than a highly wrought work of mourning, a translation into the language of politics of the yearning for childhood that lies deep in us all.

Pg. 105: Today's liberalism is described by a person who leans consciously towards the underprivileged, supports the interests of minorities and socially excluded groups, believes in the use of state power to achieve social justice, and in all probability shares the egalitarian and secular values of the nineteenth-century socialists.  The American liberal is certainly not averse to the power of the state, provided it is exerted by liberals, and exerted against conservatives. 

Pg. 128f:  George Orwell’s description of society in Nineteen Eighty-Four can now routinely be observed on university campuses on both sides of the Atlantic.  (See Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind [1987]).  Equality has become so urgent and dominating a cause that nothing of liberty remains, and all social life is absorbed into a relentless witch-hunt against the defenders of social distinctions. 

Pg. 140:  William F. Buckley Jr. was no fan of Ayn Rand.  He found her atheism repugnant, and her peculiar brand of radical individualism, detached from all traditions and all normal forms of accommodation with human weakness and imperfection, completely alien to what he saw as the essential kindness of the American inheritance. 

Pg. 141:  The Supreme Court has acquired the habit of reading into the Constitution rights and freedoms that would never have occurred to the Founders, or which would have been regarded by them with repugnance.  In particular the discovery of both a right to abortion (part of an undefined ‘right of privacy’) and a right to same-sex marriage.