The Soul of Roger Scruton

I consider it one of the great blessings of my life to have studied with Sir Roger Scruton just prior to his death. After graduating from Yale, I ventured overseas to England to study with the eminent philosopher of aesthetics, perhaps better known to a wider audience as among the handful of erudite political conservative philosophers in the English-speaking world when your stereotypical image of a conservative thinker was someone screaming on the radio or a talking head on cable news. “While most of his readers have no problem classifying Scruton as a political philosopher of a conservative persuasion,” Ferenc Hörcher writes in his new book Art and Politics in Roger Scruton’s Conservative Philosophy, “his genuine interest in art is less well known to the general reader. It is therefore worth emphasising that his frame of mind can be better understood as fundamentally that of a philosopher of art and a cultural critic, while his conservatism is, in a way, only a side product, partly determined by his views on art (particularly on beauty) and on culture, and partly by his own political experiences in Paris, Central Europe and elsewhere.”

Even though Roger may be better known as a thinker and philosopher of a “conservative” political persuasion, Hörcher is right to point out that Scruton’s conservatism was secondary to his greater love: art, culture, and music. In fact, Scruton’s conservatism grew from his aesthetic sensibilities, aesthetic sensibilities that led him to desire a preservation and promotion of western culture, its emotional and spiritual wisdom found in its architecture, literature, and spiritual traditions. For those of us who knew Roger more personally, rather than from his public reputation as a new Edmund Burke, Scruton as aesthetician first and political philosopher second is wholly and entirely accurate. That is the true soul of Roger Scruton.

In order to understand Scruton’s conservatism, how it emanated from his philosophy of art, aesthetics, and culture more generally, Hörcher takes a step back from crude politicizing and examines the philosophy of being, first with Michael Oakeshott—a significant, though often understated influence on Scruton—then backtracking further to Immanuel Kant who was Scruton’s great philosophical hero, then returning to Scruton himself. What mattered to Scruton, as with Oakeshott despite their dramatic differences in attitude and lifestyles, was their concern for experience in the world. Experience, especially, of art and its relationship to human life and activity was something that united both. How we encounter and experience the world, relate to it, and are shaped by it, all influence the “conservative” persuasion—one in which the experience of beauty, the emotional fulfillment of happiness and joy, form the basis of conservatism.

At the heart of Hörcher’s analysis of Scruton is how Roger “increasingly realised that through art we can indeed learn something about human nature which is of a metaphysical relevance.” Scruton’s conservatism leans on a “metaphysical relevance” and reverence which enriches our existence as human beings, principally from art, and how this can positively shape and influence political attitudes and ideology. The gift of art is, importantly, a gift of communal inheritance—something we are born into, like a child into a family we have not chosen, but are nurtured by it, matured from its milk and honey, and eventually come to love it for all that it provides, and how from that love comes the ethic of preservation.

Scruton’s philosophical worldview can be summarized by the phrase made famous by Dr Samuel Johnson, “the living world,” or its German equivalent, life-world (lebenswelt). Although an Englishman, Scruton’s long dance with German philosophy is what Hörcher rightly concentrates on throughout most of the work. From Kant to Hegel and culminating in Wagner, our sagacious author guides us into the aesthetic and metaphysical core of the greatest writer of conservatism of the past century. Hörcher’s analysis of Scruton’s appreciation of Wagner is the best part of this book, delicately interweaving Wagnerian analyses with Scruton and tying it back to Kant and Hegel, providing a tour-de-force in how art (re)presents the tensions between love and law, life and death, self and community—all the core concepts wrestled with in political philosophy.

Here we start to get a sense of Scruton at his best, how aesthetics (art) and metaphysics (philosophy) blend together in love (agape) and how this blending of beauty, truth, and love form the basis for the meaningful life and helps develop a concept of personhood in which the person is made fully unique in their relational ties to the things of this world which give sustenance to the soul. Our desire to love the good and beautiful things of culture brings us into a community, a communion with the dead, living, and to-be-born. This also elicits our need for self-sacrifice, a willingness to give for the things we love.

Ferenc Hörcher has done a wonderful job in tying together the seemingly disparate strands of Scruton’s thinking into a comprehensive whole. Hörcher, very gently and accurately, presents Scruton as he was: a philosopher of art and culture and how this primary love of art and culture provided the pillars for his more well-known ruminations on political theory and political philosophy. Conservatism, to the extent that Scruton can appropriately be called a conservative, is based on a love of culture and all the beautiful things that culture gives us. However, in this community of love, there is also a “practical bent in the spirit of conservatism, reminding its proponents that political affairs are finally about settling day-to-day problems in communal life.” This combination of loving the good and beautiful things of culture, the wisdom they confer to us, and the pragmatic resolving of our conflicts and problems in community so as to enjoy the good and beautiful things in a community, is the spirit of conservatism.

Conservatism, then, comes from that pragmatic dealing with others in a community of love, a willingness to sacrifice for others, a recognition of the personhood of others, and a desire to ensure “the gifts” of the community are passed on to the next generation. Scruton attempted to identify and explain how this spirit works, the central role of art and aesthetics to the conservative disposition, even if most conservatives are unaware of their own aesthetic and cultural sentiments. Anyone with a serious interest in Roger Scruton’s philosophical thinking, his consideration on the relationship between art and politics, culture and conservatism, or simply desiring to know more about the great writer’s love affair with Wagner, should read this book.

Art and Politics in Roger Scruton’s Conservative Philosophy
By Ferenc Hörcher
London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023; 404pp

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