Obituaries do not just mark the end of a life but reflect the state of the world that public figures leave. They are of interest, then, not just for what they explicitly say about the past but for what they implicitly say about the present.
With the death of Sir Roger Scruton on Sunday the Prime Minister paid tribute to “the greatest modern conservative thinker.” This view was shared by many commentators, with Michael Brendan Dougherty of National Review calling him “the most important conservative thinker of his generation.”
This is a fine tribute to Scruton, and well-deserved. But there is a mournfulness to the sentiment that transcends even the sadness of the great man’s passing, reflected in Douglas Murray’s justifiable observation that Scruton seemed “bigger than his age”. The question lurking behind these sentiments is: who is the next greatest British conservative thinker?
I am sure some names could be produced: Murray himself, Peter Hitchens, Theodore Dalrymple. All of these are fine men for whom I have great respect. All of them, however, are polemicists. There is no shame in that. I am one as well, and in a lower division. But if “intellectual” means anything then it means something else.
Niall Ferguson? I disagree with his more neoconservative politics but no one can deny his skill as a historian. John Gray? His primers for pessimists – like Enlightenment’s Wake and Black Mass – are required reading for anyone on the Right but I am not sure that he would have time for the label. No, the sad truth is that Scruton was in a class of his own. All of his rivals — Oakeshott, Quinton, Cowling and Butterfield — were dead and his loving peers were in his shadow.
The Left has its intellectuals. We like to characterise leftists as emotional if not hysterical — and that is by no means always an injustice — but they also have a deep, if narrow, emphasis on learning that the Right does not share. Read the London Review of Books and you will find a depth of literary and historical erudition that cannot be found in Right-wing publications. You can argue that the likes of Perry Anderson and David Harvey are wrong but they combine scholarship with contemporary analysis on a level that few if any British conservatives could match.
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