Roger Scruton Quotes (1944-2020)

“The future of mankind, for the socialist, is simple: pull down the existing order and allow the future to emerge.”

“It was quite by chance that I should be trotting down a Cotswold lane on a friend's old pony when the uniformed centaurs came galloping past.”

“The first effect of modernism was to make high-culture difficult: to surround beauty with a wall of erudition.”

“National loyalty involves a love of home and a preparedness to defend it; nationalism is a belligerent ideology, which uses national symbols in order to conscript the people to war.”

“The core of common culture is religion. Tribes survive and flourish because they have gods, who fuse many wills into a single will, and demand and reward the sacrifices on which social life depends.”

“There is no doubt in my mind that, from the third-person point of view, monarchy is the most reasonable form of government. By embodying the state in a fragile human person, it captures the arbitrariness and the givenness of political allegiance, and so transforms allegiance into affection.”

“Democracies owe their existence to national loyalties — the loyalties that are supposedly shared by government and opposition, by all political parties, and by the electorate as a whole. Wherever the experience of nationality is weak or non-existent, democracy has failed to take root. For without national loyalty, opposition is a threat to government, and political disagreements create no common ground.”

“It is not the truth of Marxism that explains the willingness of intellectuals to believe it, but the power that it confers on intellectuals, in their attempts to control the world. And since, as Swift says, it is futile to reason someone out of a thing that he was not reasoned into, we can conclude that Marxism owes its remarkable power to survive every criticism to the fact that it is not a truth-directed but a power-directed system of thought.”

“It was in his invocations of this thinking, feeling collective that Powell made his distinctive contribution to British politics... [T]hrough his language he placed this thing as squarely before the consciousness of his listeners as Shakespeare had done in his history plays, and invited them to recognise that he was talking not about an abstraction, but about their own destiny, which is but the microcosm of the larger destiny on which they depended.”

“To put Burke's point in a modern idiom somewhat removed from his own majestic periods: the knowledge that we need in the unforeseeable circumstances of human life is neither derived from nor contained in the experience of a single person, nor can it be deduced a priori from universal laws. This knowledge is bequeathed to us by customs, institutions, and habits of thought that have shaped themselves over generations, through the trials and errors of people many of whom have perished in the course of acquiring it.”

“I share Maurice Cowling's sense of religion as a primary social force. I also believe that it is no less strong a force in our secular age than it was in the age of faith, even if it is now less predictable and less coherent. Like Cowling, I believe that you can understand a national culture only as an outgrowth of the religious impulse that first set it in motion. And this will be the theme of my essay, which I hope will be a fitting expression of the respect I feel for an eccentric historian, whose eccentricity (like Chesterton's) is also a form of common sense.”

“Hayek fails to account either for the passion among intellectuals for equality, or for the resulting success of socialists and their egalitarian successors in driving the liberal idea from the stage of politics. This passion for equality is not a new thing, and indeed pre-dates socialism by many centuries, finding its most influential expression in the writings of Rousseau. There is no consensus as to how equality might be achieved, what it would consist in if achieved, or why it is so desirable in the first place. But no argument against the cogency or viability of the idea has the faintest chance of being listened to or discussed by those who have fallen under its spell.”

“There are certainly many insights in Foucault's early writings. But the relativist method – which identifies reality with a way of apprehending it – must lead us to doubt that they are hard-won. For this method allows him to jump across to the finishing line of historical enquiry, without running the hard track of empirical enquiry. Consider what would really have to be proved by someone who believed man to be an artefact, and a recent one at that – more recent even than the medieval and renaissance humanists who extolled man's virtues. A proper assessment of Foucault's thought must therefore try to separate its two components: the relativist sleight of hand (which would lead us too simply to dismiss him), and the ‘diagnostic’ analysis of the secret ways of power. It is the second that is interesting, and which is expressed in Foucault's claim that each successive form of ‘knowledge’ is devoted to the creation of a discourse favourable to, and symbolic of, the prevailing forms of domination.”

“If we examine the complaints made by Barnett, we cannot fail to be struck by the fact that they contain no comparative judgement. Set beside which élite did the English élite fail so badly? In which country of the modern world do we find the educational system which compares so favourably with the English college? Which European nations, unhampered by the code of the gentleman, have shown us the way to successful empire building and retreated with credit from their colonies? All such comparisons point to the amazing success of the English. By devoting their formative years to useless things, they made themselves supremely useful. And by internalising the code of honour they did not, as Barnett supposes, make themselves defenceless in a world of chicanery and crime, but endowed themselves with the only real defence that human life can offer – the instinctive trust between strangers, which enables them in whatever dangerous circumstances to act together as a team. It was not only the battle of Waterloo that was won on the playing fields of Eton: the entire imperial adventure was settled there.”

“To summarize Žižek's position is not easy: he slips between philosophical and psychoanalytical ways of arguing, and is spell-bound by Lacan's gnomic utterances. He is a lover of paradox, and believes strongly in what Hegel called 'the labour of the negative' though taking the idea, as always, one stage further towards the brick wall of paradox.”

“De Gaulle's greatness consists in the fact that, by two or three gestures of command in foreign affairs, he was suddenly able to transform the confusion of civil life in post-war France into a concerted harmony, to command renewed respect towards the institutions of the state, and to establish stable government where there had previously been chaos.”

“Jeremy Bentham – the cheerful, improving rationalist whose maxims stroll through the minds of bureaucrats, prompting them to destroy whatever they can find no reason to preserve. For a century and a half the Benthamite mentality has dominated the affairs of state, weighing laws, customs and institutions in the balance of profit, and presumptuously assuming the title to a wisdom which no mortal mind can really claim.”

“The popularity of Lady Thatcher (as she later became) was due in part to the clarity of her public statements and her ability to persuade the electorate that her convictions corresponded to their wishes – particularity in matters of taxation and opportunity. Her unpopularity among the intellectual and media élite was due both to her right-wing philosophy and to her confrontational approach to those who disagreed with her.”

“In the mid-nineteenth century the [public] schools underwent extensive reforms, championed by Dr Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby, who expanded their curriculum to include mathematics, modern languages and history, and who placed organised sport and evangelical Christianity at the centre of their social ethos. Thereafter, the public schools provided a model for secondary education in England, and one that was loved and resented in equal measure.”

“Even now the [French] Revolution is often considered in its own self-image: as a single vast occurrence, a transformation in the order of things, whose effects were felt throughout society, and whose causality lies deeper than the will of individual men. There are historians who protest against that monolithic conception—Richard Cobb, for example, who unceasingly reminds us all of the waywardness, indifference, and mute attentisme of the provinces during the Revolutionary years.”

“Can a programme for less authority, less of the state, less supervision, be reconciled with the conservative idea? Roger Scruton is certain that it cannot. In his sombre, clerkly little book, he claims that freedom "cannot occupy a central place in conservative thinking ... for the conservative, the value of individual liberty is not absolute, but stands subject to another and higher value, the authority of established government." His concern is to hunt down and expose the liberalism which hides itself in conservative colours, and – though he does not explicitly say so – the present British government stands outside his definition of conservatism. Mr Scruton's is a rare, unfashionable voice in British political writing today: the voice of real authoritarianism. He could be a 20th-century inquisitor from Kingsley Amis’s fantasy The Alteration, to whom traditional power is its own end and the very questioning of power a sin. Even the Catholic Church is enfeebled by tolerance, in his opinion. Afflicted by the fad for reform, it has "partially forgotten the tradition of custom, ceremony and judicious manoeuvre ... calling to every man with the voice of immutable authority."”

“He has quoted with approval from Joseph de Maistre, the French arch-reactionary, but hesitates to follow him to the conclusion that the public hangman is the key figure of the social order. And this illuminates an emptiness at the core of this amazing book. It is, as he says at the outset, a work of pure dogmatic. De Maistre thought that God wanted the sort of autocracy he described. Mr Scruton offers no sanction for his fearsome, static hierarchy. Religion may be encouraged, if it tightens the social bond, but is ultimately dispensable. Neither does he provide an anthropology suggesting that authoritarianism is the natural condition of the human race. His destructive criticism of liberal society has a black brilliance: his vision of the Leviathan which should replace it simply floats in the air. He asserts it is "natural"; he does not tell us why.”

“The roll-call of significant thinkers with both an abiding interest in music and sufficient musical literacy to write about it with the competence of insiders is short indeed: one thinks of Rousseau, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, perhaps Adorno. It is a cause for celebration when another such figure appears in our midst. Wagner is a particularly suitable subject for Scruton, who writes about the composer's dual nature as a musician and a thinker with uncommon insight and sympathy. His view of the nature of Wagner's achievement in Tristan und Isolde is highly original and mostly persuasive, and it illuminates even when it stimulates opposition. Death-Devoted Heart should be added to the short list of indispensable writings on this opera.”

“Professor Scruton's Right consists of the authors of the Salisbury Review under his editorship and is the nearest intellectually reputable thing that England has had to the authoritarian Conservatism which de Maistre, in a Christian, and Maurras in a post-Christian, mode had propagated in France... Professor Scruton is a serious thinker who has produced a versatile and impressive oeuvre which, in addition to dealing with law and politics, deals with aesthetics, literature, philosophy and sexuality (in a sometimes off-beam way), gives unambiguous allegiance to art and culture as modern substitutes for religion, and leaves the impression of believing in "Conservatism" either as an aborted mixture of Christianity and secular truth, or as simply secular truth in itself. For a number of years when young he was a pupil and collaborator of Dr John Casey from whom he acquired intellectual range and seriousness, a faint excess of high-principled intensity, and a coat-trailing, or Irish, contentiousness about race and colour which he had since abandoned. Also, when young, he was a Fellow of Peterhouse, from which he acquired some of the attitudes of "the Peterhouse Right".”

“Scruton's conservative philosophy draws upon Burke, Hegel, Oakeshott and Hayek, rejecting universalism and preferring instead a politics based on human instinct. In a Burkean compact between the living, the dead and the unborn, trust is placed in our collective inheritance, particularly in the form of societal organizations, practices and traditions, the law and the constitution. A sense of place and territorial loyalty is therefore central to identity. For Scruton, that place and identity is England, which is "shared not as a reality so much as an ideal which constantly impacts on reality".”

“Scruton's Beauty is dense with ideas and rich with experience. Like a Renaissance still life, it lays out before us the bountiful fruits of long and successful hunting. Scruton's yield will do little for the jaded appetites of those professional hunters and gamekeepers who have sated themselves casually with their own catch in the field or on the road. But for others who love beauty and would like better to understand what it is they love and why, this book offers on every page and understanding without pedantry, clarity without dogma, insight without mystique.”

“It is partly his own fault that outside philosophical circles Roger Scruton's ideas labour under something like a government health warning. Xanthippic Dialogues, however, is a concentrated, integrated, and wholly delightful epitome of his thought, which should appeal to both the philosopher and the general educated reader, and dispel whatever misapprehensions and deliberate misrepresentations have kept its author's profound and humane understanding from receiving the public recognition it deserves.”

“Roger Scruton's Aesthetics of music begins as a brilliant, intimidatingly thorough, rather dry exercise in analytical philosophy. It ends as a cultural tract for the times, a mystical rhapsody on the religious basis of art, and a scorching indictment of the twin evils of modernism and pop which have robbed music of its high purpose. To yoke together these two mutually hostile, if not downright incompatible, forms of discourse is a boldness that only Scruton would attempt. But he is bound to do so, given that for him the deepest roots of our being are implicated in even the simplest acts of musical understanding.”

“As a critic, Scruton is perceptive and persuasive... Roger Scruton seems characteristically British, however—an heir not only of the elite, eighteenth-century Dilettanti but of popularizing nineteenth-century propagandists such as Ruskin and Morris. Indeed, there is a moralistic fervor to his evangelism, and occasionally Scruton strikes one as a new Pugin, arguing the opposite side: favoring classicism rather than denigrating it. Unlike those ardent idealists of the last century, however, Scruton peppers his opinions with articulate British wit, irony, and sarcasm.”

“Architecture has long lacked a satisfactory treatment by philosophers dealing with the arts. Here, finally, a philosopher gives buildings full attention. The result is an impressive and persuasive account of the nature, objectives, and judgement of architecture that has, because it treats this as a matter of practical understanding, direct and practical application, not least to modern architecture... The Aesthetics of Architecture is a remarkable contribution that should interest designers, teachers, critics, and historians.”

“Roger Scruton's book [Aesthetics of Music] is the first account of music's nature and purpose — or at least the first to come my way — which attempts to explain what music is and what it is for. One reason for this is the far-ranging, wide-eyed, open-eared quality of his mind; another, more humbly practical, reason is that this may well be the only book about the philosophy and aesthetics of music that is copiously equipped with examples in handsomely printed music type... Roger Scruton's book speaks proudly on behalf of wholeness, haleness, and holiness; a beacon to our bleakness, its 'value' should endure.”

“Scruton begins his book with an expert account of the origins of the Tristan story and Wagner's treatment of it. Scruton has absolute command of this material, and he eloquently organizes it around a few central points. As a concise account of the evolution of the Tristan myth, the first two chapters of Scruton's book are unsurpassed... Scruton's deep love of Tristan seems to render him blind toward the inconsistencies of the Wagnerian enterprise and the ruptures in the fabric of the Gesamtkunstwerk. Unfortunately, this blindness undermines Scruton's arguments in the final chapters of the book. In these pages, Scruton uses Tristan to pronounce jeremiads against contemporary culture, attacking (among other things) popular music and pornography. Scruton has important things to say here, and we would take him more seriously if he did not grip so tightly onto the meaning of Wagner's work. Scruton's eloquent and persuasive prose alerts us to ways in which Wagner's music cuts across the grain of contemporary notions about love and sexuality. But the ability of Wagner's work to "speak against" or to "speak across" depends at least in part to ways in which it resists decoding and presents irreconcilable paradoxes. Scruton seems unable or unwilling to acknowledge these qualities, and his work suffers as a result.”