ROGER SCRUTON ON THE PREHISTORY OF LIBERALISM (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Political Philosophy of Conservatism
A summary of conservatism as a coherent set of ideas based on three selected texts: Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J.G.A. Pocock, Hackett, Indianapolis, Cambridge, 1987, 79-85. Roger Scruton: The Truth in COnservatism, in: Scruton: How to Be a Conservative, Bloomsbury, London, 2014., 119-133. Ferenc Hörcher: A Political Philosophy of COnservatism. Prudence, Moderation and Tradition, Bloomsbury Academic, London, 2020., 162-166.
Conservatism: Analytically Reconsidered (The Monist 99/4, 2016)
The Monist, 2016
This special issue is motivated by the observation that conservatism plays a marginal role in contemporary philosophy even though it appears to be of considerable importance in moral, social, and political reality. One reason for this neglect is that defenders of conservatism have often refrained from articulating their arguments in a language that is acceptable to and understandable by analytically trained philosophers. The contributions of this special issue show that conservatism can profitably be approached from the point of view of analytic philosophy. Many of them are indebted to Jerry Cohen's (2012) seminal paper on conservative value, which develops a sophisticated justification of what Michael Oakeshott (1991) called the disposition to be conservative. In this vein, Geoffrey Brennan and Alan Hamlin contribute two important papers, by which they complete a 'trilogy' on conservatism, that is to say a series of papers that present three forms of conservatism: adjectival, practical, and nominal. While the mentioned authors dealt with adjectival conservatism in previous work (Brennan and Hamlin 2004), in their papers in this volume they analyze practical and nominal conservatism. Practical conservatism is an attitude involving an empirical claim about possible costs and risks of departure from a status quo that is interpreted as a convention-equilibrium. Such equilibria are highly difficult to plan and replicate, so that the process of change from the prevailing equilibrium to a desired, different though not yet established equilibrium necessarily occasions significant transition costs. Hence, practical conservatism develops a status quo argument against imprudent forms of change under circumstances of uncertainty or risk. Nominal conservatives hold specific values not recognized by others and they do so even under conditions of certainty. According to Brennan and Hamlin, these specific and substantive values attribute normative authority to an element of the status quo because it is an element of the status quo. More specifically, they argue that nominal conservatives attach particular value on things of positive basic value. The opposite does not apply. Conservatives do not attribute negative particular value to things of negative basic value, as this would make conservatism indistinguishable from radicalism. Equally, they do not, here and now, attribute positive particular value to things in the future. They just consider they might do so once they get there. In sum, this means that nominal conservatives either justify the status quo because they attribute a particular value to it or they necessarily need to remain silent. There is a direct connection between this systematic point of Brennan and Hamlin and Vanessa Rampton's historical paper on the situation of conservatives in the context of czarist Russia before and after the first revolution. What disposition do conservatives adopt when they find little to no value attributable to the status quo and when a positive value in the future is merely expected and aspired to in societal action? Rampton shows that in such situations taking sides with forces of radical change is as difficult for conservatives as justifying a status quo. Under dire circumstances, when the status quo loses its value-aptness, nominal conservatism needs to go into a switch-off mode, as it can neither find value in the status quo nor in the radical change that is deemed necessary to overcome it. In all other circumstances nominal conservatism values the status quo for a particular reason not recognized by others.
Contemporary Pragmatism, 2019
At a book-in-progress session of the 2013 Summer Institute in American Philosophy , in an effort to direct the focus of the question and answer session toward ways of improving the manuscript that became Conservatism and Pragma-tism in Law, Politics, and Ethics, I told the audience what conservatism, for my purposes, was not. It does not mean a neo-liberal fetish for markets and is not equivalent to libertarianism. It does not mean neo-conservatism or advocate for re-making the world in an American image. Further, it does not mean the social conservatism of the religious right wing. And it does not advocate for white nationalism alongside the Alt Right. In the book, I indicate that my conservatism is methodological, which it is. However, to indicate that my conservatism is methodological and not political, is to concede to the assumption that the contemporary political right wing in the United States is anything but a coalition of these ideological interests from which I attempt to de-couple my conservatism. I did, as Luke Plotica points out, define conservatism negatively as skepticism of rationalism in law, politics, and ethics. Such skepticism registers as suspicion of wholesale change and the a priori method and method of authority , as defined by C.S. Peirce. To cash out this negative description in law, politics , and ethics is to distance conservatism from other methodologies in these forms of culture. In law, this means distinguishing conservatism from three important legal traditions: the legal positivism of Jeremy Bentham, John Austin, H.L.A. Hart; the metaphysical conservatism of natural law theory in the medieval tradition but also in the Blackstonian equation of the common law and natural law, referred to by Allen Mendenhall in his review essay; and perhaps most importantly, from the formalism embraced by mainstream legal conser-vatives. Plotica has rightly directed his summary and critique to the embrace of formalism qua originalism by contemporary mainstream legal conservatives, and I will address the challenges his essay poses to my attempt to de-couple my understanding of conservatism from formalist versions of legal conservatism. In politics, this meant distancing conservatism from the a priori method of