Roger Scruton in 2015. Credit: Andy Hall/Getty Images
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Roger Scruton gave Conservatism its head. He gave the movement the intellectual confidence to imagine a United Kingdom free from the European Union, and to fashion an appeal to the public based on their attachment to “the place which is theirs”.
In this, he also gave Conservatism its heart. I read The Meaning of Conservatism (1979) with some effort — rewarding, but hard work, like reading Oakeshott or Hayek. Scruton’s writings on music and aesthetics are beyond me; but his later popular work, crucially On Hunting (1998) and England: An Elegy (2000) got me in the guts. Scruton explained to me why I love my country.
On Hunting, is a pure delight. It is a deeply personal story of love and terror in the saddle (phrases have stuck: the sight of his future wife Sophie, “aloft in Beaufort colours”; the “stone teeth” of the dry-stone walls coming towards him “at the speed of the turning earth”). It is also the distillation of Conservatism, an account of the Hegelian experience in which the individual loses himself and finds himself among a community of fellows.
England: An Elegy, written in the cold dawn of the New Labour era, is provocatively nostalgic, written in the past tense, a “memorial address… to the civilisation that made me and which is now passing from the world.” Reading it now, you detect a self-mockery in the backward view. For surely Scruton’s philosophy is as current as ever. Today, 20 years after the book was published, we are seeing its fruit.
An old-new narrative is taking form in Conservatism, combining culture, place and community, with the particularly British spirit of enterprise and invention. Both halves of this combination resist a stifling central state, and the totalitarian impulse of the woke agenda; whether you want to live in a village or to start a tech business — or both, for doing both these things is now possible — you want economic and intellectual freedom, and you want to feel part of a tradition or a community that is bigger than you. This combination of freedom and belonging is the English inheritance Scruton explains to us; it is the inheritance we need for the future.
As a Wiltshire MP, albeit from the chalk downlands a few miles south of his clay country, I claim Roger Scruton for the county. He wrote at length (particularly News from Somewhere: On Settling [2004]) about its manners and its people, among whom he made his home, raised a family and became, as a foxhunter and bellringer, replete with function and with purpose.
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