|
1c1a5dc
|
The ease with which large producers can transfer their costs is the glaring abuse through which the market - otherwise one of the core values of conservatism - condemns itself.
|
|
|
Roger Scruton |
|
8705f62
|
But the long-term result has been the emergence of a new managerial class, as the multinationals move in with their takeover bids, their legal privileges and their transnational lobbyists for whom small businesses and entrepreneurs are the enemy. Those who object to this new managerialism (and I am one of them) should nevertheless recognize that what is bad in it is precisely what was bad in the old corporatist economy that Thatcher set out..
|
|
|
Roger Scruton |
|
9d2d639
|
society is not identical with the state. Society is composed of people, freely associating and forming communities of interest that socialists have no right to control and no authority to outlaw. To
|
|
|
Roger Scruton |
|
2923ef8
|
I saw that this desire to control society in the name of equality expresses exactly the contempt for human freedom that I encountered in Eastern Europe. There
|
|
|
Roger Scruton |
|
50c34c5
|
Observing the volatile nature of the new democracies, I came vividly to see how unimportant a part of democracy are elections, in comparison with the enduring institutions and public spirit that make elected politicians accountable.
|
|
|
Roger Scruton |
|
bcebecf
|
But, because of the unwise provisions of the Treaty of Rome regarding freedom of movement, it has led to the mass emigration of the professional classes, and to the loss of the educated young from countries that stand desperately in need of them. The
|
|
|
Roger Scruton |
|
34bf566
|
I never swallowed in its entirety the free-market rhetoric of the Thatcherites. But I deeply sympathized with Thatcher's motives. She wanted the electorate to recognize that the individual's life is his own and the responsibility of living it cannot be borne by anyone else, still less by the state. She hoped to release the talent and enterprise that, notwithstanding decades of egalitarian claptrap, she believed yet to exist in British socie..
|
|
|
Roger Scruton |
|
c5cfb8a
|
In the light of this, it seems to me, we should recognize that the problem of climate change that occupies international negotiations today is not in fact a diplomatic problem. It is primarily a scientific problem: the problem of discovering a cheap and effective source of clean energy that will remove both the cost of signing up to a treaty and the motive to defect from it. The solution to this scientific problem is indeed more likely to b..
|
|
|
Roger Scruton |
|
9eda67e
|
Our national jurisdictions are now bombarded by laws from outside, even though hardly any of these laws are concerned with the avoidance of war. We, the citizens, are powerless in the matter, and they, the legislators, entirely unanswerable to us, who must obey them. This is exactly what Kant dreaded, as the sure path, first to despotism and then to anarchy. The
|
|
|
Roger Scruton |
|
52d7c1c
|
Although the border between Canada and the United States is disputed, and has been disputed for a century or more, the chances that this dispute will lead to war are zero. The
|
|
|
Roger Scruton |
|
d28b4bf
|
Enemies can be confronted only if they are first brought to earth. And that means bringing them to earth somewhere, as the Americans brought al-Qa'eda to earth in Afghanistan. Globalization may have made it harder to defend ourselves against terrorist assaults, but we are nevertheless defending territory, the place where we are, and hunting down our enemies in the place where they are.
|
|
|
Roger Scruton |
|
7e2886e
|
The author assumed that the main task of government is to distribute the collective wealth of society among its members, and that, in the matter of distribution, the government is uniquely competent. The fact that wealth can be distributed only if it is first created seemed to have escaped his notice.
|
|
|
Roger Scruton |
|
d41ee53
|
In a sense you are always more clearly aware than I can be of what I am in the world; and when I confront my own face, there may be a moment of fear, as I try to fit the person whom I know so well to this thing that others know better
|
|
|
Roger Scruton |
|
e63d9bf
|
The freedom to entertain and express opinions, however offensive to others, has been regarded since Locke as the sine qua non of a free society. This
|
|
|
Roger Scruton |
|
639aa51
|
This is possible only if we retain our trust in negotiation and in the sincere desire, among politicians, to compromise with their opponents. Hence in both Britain and America it is necessary for conservatives to defend the politics of compromise, and to protect all those institutions and customs that give a voice to opposition. This
|
|
|
Roger Scruton |
|
a851483
|
the good citizen is the one who knows when voting is the wrong way to decide a question, as well as when voting is the right way. For
|
|
|
Roger Scruton |
|
58297ae
|
The Anglo-American tradition of constitutional thinking should be understood in this way, as addressing the question of how to limit the power of government, without losing its benefits. That
|
|
|
Roger Scruton |
|
eea5ef7
|
Individuals in Western states are sovereign over their own households; they enjoy consumer sovereignty through the market and political sovereignty through elections.
|
|
|
Roger Scruton |
|
356a38b
|
Kant's position is extremely subtle - so subtle, indeed, that no commentator seems to agree with any other as to what it is.
|
|
|
Roger Scruton |
|
4f67d51
|
Verificationism arose in Vienna between the wars, as part of the 'culture of repudiation' whereby central Europe threw away its inheritance and committed moral suicide.
|
|
|
Roger Scruton |
|
62767df
|
Unless and until people identify themselves with the country, its territory and its cultural inheritance - in something like the way people identify themselves with a family - the politics of compromise will not emerge. We
|
|
|
Roger Scruton |
|
5c8ad3a
|
We have to take our neighbours seriously, as people with an equal claim to protection, for whom we might be required, in moments of crisis, to face mortal danger. We do this because we believe ourselves to belong together in a shared home. The
|
|
|
Roger Scruton |
|
202c1f8
|
I arrived at the house, after walking through those silent and deserted streets, in which the few who stood seemed occupied on some dark official business, and in which party slogans and symbols disfigured every building. The staircase of the apartment building was also deserted. Everywhere the same expectant silence hung in the air, as when an air raid has been announced, and the town hides from its imminent destruction. Outside the apartm..
|
|
|
Roger Scruton |
|
64c5dd3
|
law of nature that our scientific thinking tends toward the truth, our morality toward the good, and maybe (though he doesn't go this far) our tastes toward the beautiful.
|
|
|
Roger Scruton |
|
15316f7
|
Ray Honeyford was an upright, conscientious teacher, who believed it to be his duty to prepare children for responsible life in society, and who was confronted with the question of how to do this, when the children are the offspring of Muslim peasants from Pakistan, and the society is that of England. Honeyford's article honestly conveyed the problem, together with his proposed solution, which was to integrate the children into the surround..
|
|
|
Roger Scruton |
|
16efad7
|
Indeed, the first thing you might learn, in considering jokes, is that Marcel Duchamp's urinal was one--quite a good one the first time around, corny by mid-twentieth century, and downright stupid today.
|
|
|
Roger Scruton |
|
0df6299
|
In The Theory of the Moral Sentiments, 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. And this means that people can best satisfy their interests only in a con..
|
|
|
Roger Scruton |
|
a24af4c
|
Furthermore, the social contract makes sense only if future generations are included in it. The purpose is to establish an enduring society. At once, therefore, there arises that web of non-contractual obligations that links parents to children and children to parents and that ensures, willy-nilly, that within a generation the society will be encumbered by non-voting members, dead and unborn, who will rely on something other than a mere con..
|
|
|
Roger Scruton |
|
85ad12b
|
We can envisage society as founded in a contract only if we see its members as capable of the free and responsible choice that a contract requires. But only in certain circumstances will human beings develop into rational choosers, capable of undertaking obligations and honouring promises, and oriented towards one another in a posture of responsibility. In the course of acquiring this posture towards others, people acquire obligations of qu..
|
|
|
Roger Scruton |
|
8764f61
|
In his Reflections on the French Revolution, Edmund Burke argued against the 'geometrical' politics, as he called it, of the French revolutionaries - a politics that proposed a rational goal, and a collective procedure for achieving it, and which mobilized the whole of society behind the resulting programme. Burke saw society as an association of the dead, the living and the unborn. Its binding principle is not contract, but something more ..
|
|
|
Roger Scruton |
|
172670c
|
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..
|
|
|
Roger Scruton |
|
eb0fcb3
|
In Die Welt von Gestern, Stefan Zweig attributed the decline of civil order in Europe to the myth of progress.7 In all the ideologies of his day - communism, socialism, Nazism, fascism - Zweig saw the same pernicious attempt to rewrite the principles of social order in terms of a linear progression from past to future. The cult of the leader, of the 'vanguard party', of the 'avant-garde' - all supposed that society has a direction, in the w..
|
|
|
Roger Scruton |
|
3c72322
|
The most important political effect of this displacement of civil by enterprise association has been the gradual loss of authority and decision-making from the bottom of society, and its transfer to the top. If you supply society with a dynamic purpose, especially one conceived in these linear terms, as moving always forwards towards greater equality, greater justice, greater prosperity or, in the case of the EU, 'ever closer union', you at..
|
|
|
Roger Scruton |
|
94fdfbf
|
Religion, for Father Pavel, involved no escape from the natural into the supernatural, no repudiation of this world for the sake of a better one whose unreality made it more malleable to our wishes. In his perspective, the natural and the supernatural were one and the same: the world became transparent, with the light of eternity shining from the other side.
|
|
|
Roger Scruton |
|
f5fd1b0
|
Dutilleux and
|
|
|
Roger Scruton |
|
4774ea5
|
Jean-Pierre Marquis, From a Geometrical Point of View: A Study of the History and Philosophy of Category Theory, Springer Science & Business Media, 2008.
|
|
|
Roger Scruton |
|
ac889f1
|
The pursuit of absolute or ideal beauty may distract us from the more urgent business of getting things right. It is well and good for philosophers, poets and theologians to point towards beauty in its highest form. But for most of us it is far more important to achieve order in the things surrounding us, and to ensure that the eyes, the ears and the sense of fittingness are not repeatedly offended.
|
|
|
Roger Scruton |
|
831ad6a
|
Ordinary conservatives - and many, possibly most, people fall into this category - are constantly told that their ideas and sentiments are reactionary, prejudiced, sexist or racist. Just by being the thing they are they offend against the new norms of inclusiveness and non-discrimination. Their honest attempts to live by their lights, raising families, enjoying communities, worshipping their gods, and adopting a settled and affirmative cult..
|
|
|
Roger Scruton |
|
cb3199b
|
The dead and the unborn make their presence known through traditions, institutions, and laws.
|
|
|
Roger Scruton |
|
111cf37
|
If you ask a conservative for a statement of his political convictions, he may well say that he has none, and that the greatest heresy of modernity is precisely to see politics as a matter of convictions as though one could recuperate, at the level of political purpose, the consoling certainty which once was granted by religious faith. In another sense, however, conservatism does rest in a system of belief, and is opposed as much to the the..
|
|
socialism
religion
convictions
conservatives
liberalism
|
Roger Scruton |
|
fe9cf68
|
Habits of secrecy, made necessary by the actual relations between states, violate the 'transcendental formula of public right', which is that an action is wrong if it is not compatible with being made public (PP, R. 126).
|
|
|
Roger Scruton |
|
bac0a0b
|
If we cannot justify the very concept of the aesthetic, except as ideology, then aesthetic judgement is without philosophical foundation. An 'ideology' is adopted for its social or political utility, rather than its truth. And
|
|
|
Roger Scruton |
|
13c2c64
|
When the chips are down, Orwell argued, our workers do not defend their class but their country, and they associate their country with a gentle way of life in which unusual and eccentric habits - such as not killing one another - are accepted as the way things are. In these respects, Orwell also thought, the leftist intellectuals will always misunderstand the workers, who want nothing to do with a self-vaunting disloyalty that only intellec..
|
|
|
Roger Scruton |
|
a4cc456
|
One thing is immediately apparent, and this is that many statements made in the first-person case are epistemologically privileged.
|
|
|
Roger Scruton |