Roger Scruton's Conservatism: Between Xenophobia and Oikophobia

The English philosopher Roger Scruton calls himself a functional anthropologist. That means he defends the lifeworld—the relational, moral world in which we all must live—against the educated derision of the monstrous entity often called the self-conscious intellectual or elitist cosmopolitan. My focus here is to examine Scruton's defense of the nation—as the civilized mean between xenophobia and oikophobia—and religion as indispensable forms of social belonging. I conclude by offering the beginnings of an American and Catholic correction to his British form of liberal conservatism.     

‘There Is Graite Odds between A Mans being At Home And A Broad’: Deborah Read Franklin and the Eighteenth‐Century Home

From 1764 to her death in 1774, Deborah Franklin lived in ‘their’ new house without husband Benjamin. The correspondence between them reveals several ambiguously gendered constructions of that house – ideologically, materially, and architecturally. Deborah was ‘homeless’ legally and conceptually. Her household variously consisted of her mother, her adopted son, her daughter, relatives, guests, boarders and servants – she permanently assumed the role of head of the household. His household consisted of his landlady, Widow Margaret Stevenson, and her daughter Polly – he could not assume his role as head of household. Moreover, as Deborah wrote to her husband about turning the house into a fortress during a raid on it during Stamp Act crisis, he wrote to her about the household goods; as she talked about politics, he discussed familial matters. Their permeable, even ambiguous, masculine and feminine roles reconstructed the meaning – and thereby symbolised the gendered complexity – of the early American white middling and elite eighteenth‐century home.     

American Conservatism 2012: A Historical Perspective

Abstract

This essay examines the peculiar history of American political thought to seek a possible explanation for why conservatism in the United States remains a movement without a spokesperson or a platform to which all citizens of this country who describe themselves as conservative can subscribe. The primary cause of these problems appears to be a serious mismatch between the traditional conservative traits of caution and limits and the historic American spirit of dynamic change and boundless optimism.     

Decadent Conservatism: Politics and Aesthetics in The Senate

Abstract: The relationship between late-Victorian Decadence and Aestheticism and politics has long been vexed. This article explores the hitherto under-explored confluence of conservatism and avant-garde literature in the period by introducing The Senate, a Tory-Decadent journal that ran from 1894-7. While Decadent authors occupied various political positions, this article argues that The Senate offers a crucial link between conservatism and Decadence The article presents the journal in its political and publishing context, outlining its editorial position on such issues as the Liberal Unionist-Conservative coalition governments, Britain's relationship with Europe and the threat of ‘State Socialism’, as well as its valorisation of Bollingbroke and eighteenth-century Toryism, and its relationship to, and difference from, key Decadent journals the Yellow Book and The Savoy. It then goes on to articulate its relationship to Decadence by focussing on the presence of Paul Verlaine in its pages and its vitriolic response to the press coverage of Oscar Wilde's trials. The article concludes by exploring the surprising wake of The Senate, briefly tracing the editors' influence in the development of Modernism and links with the journal BLAST.     

Roger Scruton's Conservatism and the Liberal Regime

Although Roger Scruton insists on the incompatibility of his conservatism and the fundamental liberal principles of individualism and consent, his political thought has much in common with classical liberal constitutionalism. This essay explores these relationships while arguing that particularly Locke's constitutionalism is more compatible with Scruton's ideas than he allows. Specifically, Scruton argues that authority necessarily precedes any individual claims, but Locke's civil society, in fact, subordinates individual rights to political authority and common goods. Similarly, Scruton's insists that the state is an end rather than a means, but his own account of the conditionality of allegiance approaches Locke's understanding of legitimacy in the practice of civic association. This narrowing of the differences suggests that a conservative teaching could begin with an education in liberal constitutionalism rightly understood.     

Conservatism,Aesthetic and Active: Reflections on Roger Scruton and Pierre Manent

Roger Scruton and Pierre Manent provide us much to admire, as authors and as men, and much to ponder. They can be seen as collaborators in the defense of the nation-state against the empty universalism of “human rights,” and, more generally, in exposing the boundless arrogance and blindness of modern rationalism insofar as it denies its inheritance from premodern sources. This defense of the nation-state and critique of secular rationalism are of vital interest to moral and political conservatives, and Scruton, for his part, has explicitly taken on the cause and the label of conservatism. But conservatives face an imposing and, I propose here, critically instructive obstacle in appropriating the teachings of these two contemporary giants. For, as soon as we begin to examine the foundations of their respective projects, Scruton's and Manent's approaches appear to be, not only quite different (and therefore, one might hope, complementary) but in an important sense directly opposed to one another. This opposition appears most directly in their respective estimates of the realm of politics: one would exaggerate little in saying that, for Manent, politics is everything, whereas Scruton wishes to constrict the reach of politics to the minimum. Thus, Scruton embraces the title “conservative” but understands it apolitically, whereas Manent declines to identify himself as conservative but fully embraces a political task essential to conservatism. Conservatives must confront this disconcerting opposition and see what can be learned from it.     

Edwardian Conservatism and the Constitution: The Thought of Lord Hugh Cecil

This article presents an analysis of the political thought of Lord Hugh Cecil. It argues that in order to understand Cecil's thought it is necessary to emphasize the role of the constitution in his thinking. There are three reasons for this. First, his opposition to Chamberlain's tariff reform campaign was rooted in a view of the detrimental effects the policy would have on politics, evidence for which Cecil saw in the tactics used by the tariff reformers. Second, because his opposition to the Parliament Bill and to the home rule proposals, which lay behind the removal of the house of lords' veto, was similarly rooted in what he saw as the unconstitutional nature of these measures. Third, because Cecil was an active proponent of constitutional reforms that were designed to ensure that the second chamber could still exercise a restraining influence on government and so stand up for the interests of what he saw as the moderate majority of the people.