I'll write a good, long review of this one - just hold your horses for a while. In the meantime ....

Whatever your political persuasion, it's refreshing to get a philosopher's definition of conservatism rather than a demagogue's (and it doesn’t hurt that the author’s a Brit). In essence, the conservative position is skeptical about the goodness and reliability of human nature, and it doesn’t have a program per se, but considers any “liberal” position to bear a burden to demonstrate that a scheme for change is reasonably likely to result in improvement. It’s neither a mindless position nor one opposed to change, but it is inherently cautious. It also doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with finance capitalism, nor with any of a number of things in the contemporary American Republican Party platform. The overexposed American “conservative” pundits and demagogues would find a lot they don’t like in this book. ( )

An extraordinary read (I read the second edition, originally published in 1984): most of Scruton's discussion here is pre-Thatcher/Regan, and his understanding of conservatism is rather shocking. There's little here about the importance of ridding ourselves of government, and living as free individuals; there's much more about the cultivation of traditions and communities (i.e., the very things that contemporary conservatives do their best to productively disrupt). Scruton's 'dogmatic' (his word) statement of these conservative values and beliefs is clear, honest and should be appealing to anyone who has even a shred of basic humanity left in them after the neoliberal decades.

But it's also fascinating to read this as a document of its time. For Scruton, conservatism is allegiance to the existence of a tradition in the present as a form of authority. This only makes sense if the tradition is actually effective in the present: an invented tradition, or a 'rediscovered' tradition, cannot be the basis for a conservative allegiance (so white power, for instance, is not conservative).

And here is where the problem starts for a conservative like Scruton. What do you do, as a conservative, if the effective tradition of the present just is, as I think it is, a kind of wishy-washy classical liberalism? His solution is to insist that 'liberalism' is an "elite creed". It's almost possible that this was true in the late seventies, when he first wrote the book (though, of course, election results would tell a different story: the Tories returned to power as liberals, as did the Republicans). But today? Today, the effective tradition in the anglo-saxon world, as well as many other parts of the world, just is the liberalism of pleasure seeking individuals.

So now the conservative seems to have no leg to stand on. Liberalism (individualism, moral relativism, anti-government, light-libertarianism) just *is* his society, and largely thanks to the parties he has supported over the last thirty years.

Where to from there? How can you be a conservative in a radically individualistic, self-seeking, capitalist world? To paraphrase G. A. Cohen, sometimes you need a revolution to conserve that which is worth saving. True conservatives will have no truck with this, believing as they do that any 'utopian' desire for a better world is inherently dangerous. They might be right. But either way, if you are a conservative in both senses (you want to conserve the traditions of the human species--let's call them 'civilization'--and you believe radical political and social change is unwelcome), you essentially have no choice but to retire to a fortress somewhere out of the way, cultivate your goats, and collect books, in the hope that in a few generations people will come to their senses and start valuing that which is truly worth saving.

And I'm far more comfortable with those people than I am with those who try to have it both ways. You can't be a conservative, and a capitalist: the world doesn't work that way. Capitalism (i.e., the widespread practice of preferring the profitability to other values) is revolutionary. It doesn't disrupt the outdated in favor of the efficient; it destroys the past. Scruton knows this very well, and argues for strong control of capital and labor flows.

Anyway, Scruton's book is almost uniformly excellent, though he does let a few of the Good Olde Englishe bigotries slip in. Why, I wonder, can't a society of more than one race function perfectly well? No answer forthcoming. What possible harm does it do to anyone if a man somewhere rubs his genitals on the genitals of another man? No answer.

And like all conservative political theorists, he slips between 'state' and 'society' far too easily when he wants to (i.e., society is a good tradition, state is an unwarranted interference in society), while distinguishing between them rigorously when that suits his claim better (i.e., the state must be supported in war because of patriotism, society should not be involved in this).

Sooner or later someone will write a book that combines the best of conservatism (community, security, dignity for individuals, respect for tradition) with the best of socialism (economic security, equality for disadvantaged groups, awareness of historical injustices and their continuing effects). And when that happens, the real conservatives and the real socialists can come together to fight off the horrors of the liberal regime we currently live under. Of course, those five people won't be able to get much done, but what they write will be substantially better than the garbage churned out under the Washington Consensus and its offspring. ( )