Karl Williams: Did conservatism die with Sir Roger Scruton?

We should embrace his legacy and wear the label "conservative" with pride

Why is it that we adhere to ‘conservatism’? Following his untimely death in January 2020, Roger Scruton was eulogised as Britain’s ‘greatest modern conservative thinker’, ‘the leading contemporary philosophical defender of conservatism’ and ‘the greatest conservative of our age’ by friends and foes alike. Yet the ‘conservative’ label was not one that had been overly conducive to success in life. 

Scruton was endlessly persecuted for the audacity of being a self-proclaimed ‘conservative intellectual’. During his time as Reader in Aesthetics at Birkbeck, for example, he was invited to address the philosophy society of a certain Scottish university. He arrived on campus only to discover that the faculty had organised a boycott of his talk – in today’s parlance, he had been no-platformed. Rather than lecturing on beauty, he instead got to watch ‘a desultory procession of apparatchiks’ on their way to confer an honorary degree on Robert Mugabe.     

Worn down by all this, he came close to suicide. But he was generally able to respond to such situations with the same sangfroid that sustained him during his ventures behind the Iron Curtain. Indeed, he found being roughed up by the Czechoslovakian secret police rather more intellectually stimulating than the socialist protestors who harassed him at home in Britain.

Even when he eventually attained some establishment recognition as Sir Roger Scruton, he remained a target precisely because he was an unabashed conservative. In 2019, he was sacked from a government commission after distorted quotes were published by the journalist George Eaton. Scruton died of cancer less than a year later. 

Perhaps if Scruton had elaborated his political thought in books with titles like ‘Political Order’ or ‘Natural Justice and Social Justice’, rather than ‘The Meaning of Conservatism’ (1980) and ‘How to be a Conservative’ (2014), he might have been subject to less opprobrium and gained more traction for his ideas. Yet he stuck to his guns. 

While few of us live lives as worthy as Scruton’s, most of us can probably think of times when we have suffered socially or professionally merely for calling ourselves conservatives. 

And the shame commonly attached to conservatism does matter for politics and policy. Self-abnegating conservatism has a sociological substratum – the graduate dinner party – but it has little appeal for voters in the shires and provincial towns who formed the backbone of the disintegrating 2019 Conservative majority.    

So why is it that we should cling to the ‘conservatism’ and ‘conservative’ labels when they bring such personal and political penalties, and when it might be easier to achieve the same ends with a radically different political language? A compelling answer is to be found in Scruton’s political thought, in his profound account of tradition, and in his own project for the conservation of conservatism. 

The way in which Scruton conceptualised tradition evolved over time, gaining in depth and richness. His initial conception was a melding of the literary modernism of T.S. Eliot  (tradition as ‘a living thing’ consisting in ‘historical sense’) and Burke’s partnership between the living, dead and unborn. Traditions were valuable because they induced a transhistorical sense of social membership, which political order, in Scruton’s anti-contractarian account, presupposed. 

But in later writings, after his Hayekian epistemological turn, Scruton also came to emphasise the importance of tradition as a repository or residue of tacit knowledge. He justified free markets and enduring tradition in the same terms, as ‘distillations of socially necessary knowledge’ – means of coordination dispersed information, but with the first operating ‘synchronically’ and the second ‘diachronically’.  

Increasingly, he came to synthesise Eliot on historical sensibility, Burke’s defence of prejudice, Oakeshott’s attack on rationalism in politics, Hayek’s theory of spontaneous orders, Smith’s invisible hand, Hegel’s cunning of reason – all were woven together to defend the ‘inherited forms of social knowledge’ which buttress our social and moral ecology.

By way of example, one of the most important traditions for Scruton was the English common law. He saw this both in Eliotian terms – as ‘the expression of a deep historical sense, a sense of the continuity and vitality of an existing social order’ – and in epistemic terms, as encoding not just specific judgements and axioms of just conduct, but an entire mode of jurisprudential reasoning. The conservation of such traditions was for Scruton a core part of conservatism. 

And one of these traditions was conservatism itself. In the form of canons of key thinkers and political moments, it was the residue of past critical judgements embedding inter-related ideas, principles and values – a ‘political dogmatics’. It was a guide to conservative action which did not require reversion to first principles. Significantly, unlike liberalism and socialism, it was also a tradition which encoded how to conserve other traditions – a sort of meta-tradition. To discard the conservative label would have been tantamount to discarding a vital cognitive and social resource.  

Indeed, he was often worried about what would happen if the conservative tradition were ruptured. Restoring a living tradition was one thing, but worshipping at ‘nostalgic totems’ was another. In the Blair years, he fretted that ‘British Tories are becoming notorious for the thinness of their philosophy, the irresolution of their politics and their repeated failure to make an impact in the world of ideas’. That is a description that might feel familiar to readers today. 

In holding fast to ‘conservatism’ despite the opprobrium, we should see ourselves, like Scruton, as husbanding a cognitive resource and engaging in a modernist work of revitalisation. It is from this basis that we can, as James Vitali argued in an earlier edition of this newsletter, find a way to ‘articulate our enduring principles in changed circumstances’. 

For all the difficulties it caused him, Scruton never renounced the conservative appellation – quite the opposite. In this, as in many other things, we should follow his example. 

Karl Williams is Deputy Researcher Director at the Centre for Policy Studies. His prize-winning MPhil thesis was titled ‘The multiple conservatisms of Roger Scruton, c.1980-2020’