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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 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.. | conservatives convictions liberalism religion socialism | 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 | ||
| e7feb94 | Virtues like thrift and self-sacrifice, the habit of offering and receiving respect, the sense of responsibility - all those aspects of the human condition that shape us as stewards and guardians of our common inheritance - arise through our growth as persons, by creating islands of value in the sea of price. To acquire these virtues we must circumscribe the 'instrumental reasoning' that governs the life of Homo oeconomicus. We must vest ou.. | Roger Scruton | ||
| 5fbd91d | That, in my view, is the truth in socialism, the truth of our mutual dependence, and of the need to do what we can to spread the benefits of social membership to those whose own efforts do not suffice to obtain them. | Roger Scruton | ||
| 8c87218 | 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. At | Roger Scruton | ||
| 30ec693 | From this arises the belief that the order of nature is all that there really is. But to draw that conclusion would be a mistake, for two reasons. First, the Lebenswelt is irreducible. We understand and relate to it using concepts of agency and accountability that have no place in the physical sciences; to use the idiom of Sellars, the Lebenswelt exists in "the space of reasons," not in "the space of law." | Roger Scruton | ||
| f9111c8 | As a call to rectify the existing order, socialism should appeal to us all. But as an attempt to revise human nature, and to conscript us in the pursuit of the millennium, it was a dangerous fantasy, an attempt to realize heaven that would lead inevitably to hell. We can see this clearly now, as the Western world emerges from the Cold War and the communist nightmare. But still the 'totalitarian temptation', as Jean-Francois Revel called it,.. | Roger Scruton | ||
| 794f102 | If you describe desire in the terms that have become fashionable- as the pursuit of pleasurable sensations in the private parts- then the outrage and pollution of rape become impossible to explain. Rape, on this view, is every bit as bad as being spat upon: but no worse. In fact, just about everything in human sexual behaviour becomes impossible to explain- and it is only what I have called the 'charm of disenchantment' that leads people to.. | Roger Scruton | ||
| 769c86a | A society governed by consent does not necessarily issue from a social contract, whether actual or implied. It is a society in which dealings between citizens, and between citizens and those in authority, are consensual, in the manner of daily courtesies, games of football, theatrical events or family meals. As Adam Smith made clear, order may emerge from consensual dealings. But it emerges 'by an invisible hand', and not, as a rule, becaus.. | Roger Scruton | ||
| 161f471 | accountable government does not come through elections. It comes through respect for law, through public spirit and through a culture of confession. To think that there is a merely accidental connection between those virtues and our Judaeo-Christian heritage is to live in cloud cuckoo land. It is to overlook the culture that has focused, down the centuries, on the business of repentance. | Roger Scruton | ||
| a0714ff | While he joined eagerly in the contemporary intellectual battles, philosophy was, for Spinoza, not a weapon but a way of life, a sacred order whose servants were transported to a supreme and certain blessedness. | philosophy | Roger Scruton | |
| 99ae88e | Smith did not regard economic freedom as the sum of politics, nor did he believe that self-interest is the only, or even the most important, motive governing our economic behaviour. A market can deliver a rational allocation of goods and services only where there is trust between its participants, and trust exists only where people take responsibility for their actions and make themselves accountable to those with whom they deal. In other w.. | Roger Scruton | ||
| b281aab | Free speech is a sign of a strong first-person plural, which enables people who disagree over fundamental things to live together in a condition of mutual toleration. | Roger Scruton | ||
| 2b32191 | We must not think of this merely as a theological or metaphysical question. For | Roger Scruton | ||
| 08d2fe9 | As I try to show, conservative thinking has never been devoted to freedom alone. Nor has the agenda been about economic freedom, important though that was during the debates and upheavals of the twentieth century. It has been about our whole way of being, as heirs to a great civilisation and a many-layered bequest of laws, institutions and high culture. For conservatives our law-governed society came into being because we have known who we .. | Roger Scruton | ||
| cb57395 | The American liberal is certainly not averse to the power of the state, provided it is exerted by liberals, and exerted against conservatives. | conservatism liberal | Roger Scruton | |
| 003435f | He describes a particular faculty, reason, in its illegitimate employment; he also demolishes all the claims to knowledge that this faculty tempts us to make. | Roger Scruton | ||
| 73a086b | The diagnosis of these errors follows a common pattern. Each attempt by pure reason to establish the metaphysical doctrines towards which it is impelled transgresses the limits of experience, applying concepts in a manner that is 'unconditioned' by the faculty of intuition. | Roger Scruton |