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Gradually this truth is beginning to dawn on the political class, so that even socialists have come to accept that the poor are not helped by taking revenge against the rich, but by opening the doors to social advancement. Since
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Roger Scruton |
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7a8ac27
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When I put my trust in a critic, this is tantamount to saying that I defer to his judgement, even when I have made no judgement of my own. But my own judgement waits upon experience. It is only when I have heard the piece in question, in the moment of appreciation, that my borrowed opinion can actually become a judgement of mine.
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Roger Scruton |
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all the respects that I have so far mentioned, conversation fits the bill of a free association which is subservient to no purpose but itself, and which is destroyed by the bossiness and urgencies of the planner, the utopian and the rationalist. On the other hand, conversations have to be among few participants if they are to dispense with some kind of central discipline or with accepted procedures and conventions. As
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Roger Scruton |
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So conceived, the English police force served to emphasize a fundamental truth about the English law, which is that it exists not to control the individual but to free him. The
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Roger Scruton |
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the growing materialism of our societies. This materialism informs political discourse at every level, making wealth and its distribution the only issue that is discussed for long. As a result, people think of conservatism merely as a form of complacency towards the current system of material rewards, which has nothing whatever to say about the things that 'money can't buy', or about the effect of the consumer society on our deeper values. ..
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Roger Scruton |
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e0bbdd1
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Subsequent revolutions have in like manner regarded the Church as Public Enemy number 1, precisely because it creates a realm of value and authority outside the reach of the state. It
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Roger Scruton |
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Political order, in short, requires cultural unity, something that politics itself can never provide.
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Roger Scruton |
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Hence, by a series of almost unnoticed changes, allowing ever easier divorce, and ever more blatant neglect of children, the state has overseen the gradual undoing of the marriage vow, to
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Roger Scruton |
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6c876a1
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In general we should be aware of, and protective towards, those precious legal instruments that we already possess, and which often depend on principles of equity and natural law and not on top-down legislation.
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Roger Scruton |
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Without a criterion enabling us to distinguish genuine human rights from the many impostors we will never be sure that our legal provisions, however wise, benevolent and responsible, will be secure against the individual desire to escape from them.
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Roger Scruton |
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I think we can all see the force of the idea that there are certain things that cannot be done to human beings - certain basic goods, including life itself, that cannot be taken away from them unless they in some way forfeit them. Life,
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Roger Scruton |
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Furthermore, we can understand those basic freedoms as rights partly because we can understand the reciprocal duty to respect them. My right to life is your duty not to kill me: and duties of non-encroachment and non-infliction are naturally upheld by morality and easily enforced by the law. However,
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Roger Scruton |
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6836bb6
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Academic philosophers in the English speaking world still regard philosophy as Locke defined it in the 17th century, as "the handmaiden of the sciences": it doesn't explore the world beyond science but the limits of science, with the result that philosophy doesnt really intrude into the public world. In the early 20th century were were caught up by the movement to form analytical philosophy, based in the study of logic, the foundations of m..
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Roger Scruton |
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The idea that scientific method is the only method of discovering the truth has a lot to be said for it, if you mean by truth how the world ultimately is as a system of organised matter, but I defend cognitive dualism: that world can be understood completely in another way which also has its truths which are not translatable into the truths of science. So we have to look at the different ways we organise this material that science explains ..
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Roger Scruton |
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One of the great gifts of the Enlightenment is that we can form communities without necessaily agreeing on ultimate metaphysical grounds. We know that to a great extent that the principles of social coordination are manmade, we recognise the right of the other to exist. This is something that distinguishes our part of the world from the middle East.
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Roger Scruton |
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in a thousand ways people combine not just in circles of friendship but in formal associations, willingly adopting and submitting to rules and procedures that regiment their conduct and make them accountable for doing things correctly. Such associations are a source not only of enjoyment but also of pride: they create hierarchies, offices and rules to which people willingly submit because they can see the point of them. They are also viewed..
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Roger Scruton |
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There is, in the circumstances of modern life, only one solution to the problem of resentment, and that is social mobility. The worst thing that the state can do is to create those traps - the poverty trap, the welfare trap, the education trap - which deprive people of the motives and the skills to improve their lot, and retain them in a state of permanent discontented dependence on a world that they cannot fully enter. In
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Roger Scruton |
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No market economy can function properly without the support of legal and moral sanctions, designed to hold individual agents to their bargains, and to return the cost of misbehaviour to the one who causes it. But
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Roger Scruton |
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f975018
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Decisions are free when each of us settles his path through life by negotiation, playing his cards according to his own best judgement and without coercion from others. Traditional liberalism is the view that such a society is possible only if the individual members have sovereignty over their own lives - which means being free both to grant and to withhold consent respecting whatever relations may be proposed to them. Individual sovereignt..
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Roger Scruton |
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Even socialists steer away from any criticism of the real corporate predation, which is the predation on future generations in which we too are involved. Like
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Roger Scruton |
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Western democracies did not create the virtue of citizenship; on the contrary, they grew from it. Nothing is more evident in The Federalist than the public spirit that it puts in play, in opposition to factions, cabals and private scheming. As
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Roger Scruton |
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The opportunity to live our lives as we will; the security of impartial law, through which our grievances are answered and our hurts restored; the protection of our environment as a shared asset, which cannot be seized or destroyed at the whim of powerful interests; the open and enquiring culture that has shaped our schools and universities; the democratic procedures that enable us to elect our representatives and to pass our own laws - the..
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Roger Scruton |
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It is only when people have rights of property, and can freely exchange what they own for what they need, that a society of strangers can achieve economic coordination. Socialists
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Roger Scruton |
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Oakeshott believed that civil association has been increasingly displaced by enterprise, under pressure from political elites, managers, parties and ideologues. It is not only socialists with their goals of equality and social justice who have contributed to this displacement. The liberal attempt to adopt the contours of an abstract and universal idea of justice and human rights; the supposedly conservative pursuit of economic growth as the..
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Roger Scruton |
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union', you at the same time license the would-be leaders. You give credentials to those who promise to guide society along its allotted path, and you confer on them the authority to conscript, dictate, organize and punish the rest of us, regardless of how we might otherwise wish to lead our lives. In particular, you authorize the invasion of those institutions and associations that form the heart of civil society, in order to impose on the..
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Roger Scruton |
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At the same time, instead of limiting the power of the state, alleged human rights have begun to enhance that power, and to bring the state into all our disputes on the side of the favoured party. Rights,
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Roger Scruton |
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The long-term effect of this has been to open Western societies to immigration, and to impart an ideal of citizenship that, it is hoped, will enable people of disparate origins and backgrounds to live together, recognizing that the real source of their obligations lies not in that which divides them - race and religion in particular - but in that which unites them - territory, good government, the day-to-day routines of neighbourliness, the..
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Roger Scruton |
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The first is that the conservative cause has been polluted by the ideology of big business, by the global ambitions of the multinational companies, and by the ascendancy of economics in the thinking of modern politicians. Those factors have led conservatives to enter into alliance with people who regard the effort to conserve things as both futile and quaint. The second reason is that the truth in environmentalism has been obscured by the a..
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Roger Scruton |
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Over a large range of cases, environmental problems arise from our entirely reasonable habit of taking the benefits of our activities, while passing on the costs. The environment is degraded because we externalize the costs of what we do; and the solution is to find the motives that will return the costs to the one who creates them.
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Roger Scruton |
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20d8f36
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this is to mistake the effect for the cause. In a free economy such ways of making money emerge by an invisible hand from choices made by all of us. It is the demand for cars, oil, cheap food and expendable luxuries that is the real cause of the industries that provide these things. Of
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Roger Scruton |
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The solution is to adjust our demands, so as to bear the costs of them ourselves, and to find the way to put pressure on businesses to do likewise. And
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Roger Scruton |
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The most interesting aspect of this culture of repudiation has been the attack on the central place accorded to reason in human affairs by the writers, philosophers and political theorists of the Enlightenment. The old
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Roger Scruton |
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493080d
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we find the university dominated by theology of another kind - a godless theology, to be sure, but one no less insistent upon unquestioning submission to doctrine, and no less ardent in its pursuit of heretics, sceptics and debunkers. People are no longer burned at the stake for their views: they simply fail to get tenure, or, if they are students, they flunk the course. But the effect is similar, namely to reinforce an orthodoxy in which n..
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Roger Scruton |
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The Abbe Sieyes, in his inflammatory pamphlet, What is the Third Estate? of 1789, expressed the point succinctly. 'The nation is prior to everything. It is the source of everything. Its will is always legal ... The manner in which a nation exercises its will does not matter; the point is that it does exercise it; any procedure is adequate, and its will is always the supreme law.' Twenty
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Roger Scruton |
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modern economies have developed ways of avoiding costs or passing them on that effectively remove the sanctions from dishonest or manipulative behaviour. The
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Roger Scruton |
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In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith argued that self-interest can solve this problem. Given a free economy and an impartial rule of law, self-interest leads towards an optimal distribution of resources. Smith
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Roger Scruton |
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Smith emphasized that trust, responsibility and accountability exist only in a society that respects them, and only where the spontaneous fruit of human sympathy is allowed to ripen. It is where sympathy, duty and virtue achieve their proper place that self-interest leads, by an invisible hand, to a result that benefits everyone.
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Roger Scruton |
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In place of top-down government, Burke made the case for a society shaped from below, by traditions that have grown from our natural need to associate. The important social traditions are not just arbitrary customs, which might or might not have survived into the modern world. They are forms of knowledge. They contain the residues of many trials and errors, as people attempt to adjust their conduct to the conduct of others. To
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Roger Scruton |
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In discussing tradition, we are not discussing arbitrary rules and conventions. We are discussing answers that have been discovered to enduring questions. These
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Roger Scruton |
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Conservatives believe in private property because they respect the autonomy of the individual. But it is fair to say that too many conservatives have failed to take seriously the many abuses to which property is subject. Libertarian
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Roger Scruton |
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6909211
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Spinoza left a celebrated description of his life's endeavour: After experience had taught me that all things which frequently take place in ordinary life are vain and futile; when I saw that all the things I feared and which feared me had nothing good or bad in them save in so far as the mind was affected by them, I determined at last to inquire whether there might be anything which might be truly good and able to communicate its goodness,..
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Roger Scruton |
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8ff1f3d
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the market is the benign mechanism that Hayek and others describe only when it is constrained by an impartial rule of law, and only when all participants bear the costs of their actions as well as reaping the benefits.
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Roger Scruton |
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b961e52
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Instead of the benign competition to secure a market share, we discover a malign competition to externalize costs. The firm that can transfer its costs to others has the advantage over the one that must meet its costs itself, and if the costs can be transferred so widely that it is impossible to identify a victim, they can be effectively written off.
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Roger Scruton |
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Why do the defenders of the market not raise their voices against the practice of externalizing costs in that way? After
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Roger Scruton |