The Personal and the Political in Roger Scruton's Conservatism

Roger Scruton's philosophical enterprise is an effort to “save the appearances” of value in the human world that elude scientific explanation. The meaning of the human things appears only to a first-person perspective, which is incommensurable with the objective perspective of cause and effect. To make sense of our experience requires a “cognitive dualism” that can account for the human or “lifeworld” as well as physical reality. Ranging rather indiscriminately over Scruton's diverse writings, I expound the unifying conception of personhood that makes them a coherent whole and also serves as the touchstone for Scruton's conservative critique of liberal theory and practice. Some questions are raised about that two-dimensional critique, about its separation into “metaphysical” and “empirical” components, and about whether the latter does or doesn't “operationalize” the former.     

Operation Binnacle: British plans for military intervention against a 1965 coup in Kenya

In April 1965, the rumour of a potential Kenyan coup was brought to British attention. This was a moment of raised tensions in the government of President Jomo Kenyatta, who secretly asked the British government for a military commitment to support his government if a coup was attempted by Kenyan Vice President Oginga Odinga. The British military responded by making an extensive military plan to intervene, code-named Operation Binnacle. They sent ships to Mombasa and put troops on alert. This article assesses these plans as a case study of the logic, and limits, of British military interventionism in the years after decolonization. It highlights the importance of studying plans, even when not carried out, and of taking seriously the attitudes and fears of contemporaries. Although a coup was highly unlikely, British reactions are revealing of their concerns about independent Kenya, including possible Soviet involvement. Operation Binnacle was a serious British response to the threat, as they saw it, which a coup would cause to their interests. These were extensive enough that the British government was prepared to intervene militarily, during a brief moment when military interventionism in Africa was still seriously considered as a possible policy choice.     

Between court and counts: Carolingian Catalonia and the aprisio grant, 778–897

In the late eighth century, Charlemagne issued a new kind of land grant in Septimania and the Spanish March to refugees fleeing Muslim Spain. This grant, the aprisio , was made from fiscal land in deserted areas and included special rights and immunities. Previous scholars have interpreted the aprisio in economic and military terms as a mechanism to entice settlers to the region in order to make the land productive and to provide warriors to defend the Frankish frontier. This article suggests that political concerns also may have played an important role, arguing that the aprisio grant was an attempt by Carolingian kings to limit the power exercised by very powerful marcher counts.     

Crisis as potential for collective action: Violence and humanitarianism on the Polish-Ukrainian border

The notion of crisis has evolved from a sudden, acute event to a broader disruption of stable historical narratives and the future. This article explores how the crisis surrounding the Russian invasion of Ukraine challenged the inevitability of Poland's membership in the West and threatened to catapult it back into a history of war and Russian domination. However, for Polish volunteers aiding Ukrainian refugees and the military, the crisis was also a temporality in which their actions took on outsize importance. By working on seemingly mundane tasks of provisioning and transport, they attempted to shape history and, in doing so, redefined the concept of humanitarianism in times of crisis. This article highlights how crisis can serve as a potential for collective action, blurring the distinction between individual and collective agency and redefining how people respond to crises.     

Back to the future: eugenics--a bibliographic essay

The following essay is a review of the literature about the American eugenics movement produced by scholars over the last fifty years. The essay provides an explanation for today's renewed interest in the subject and for why the science of eugenics remains relevant to contemporary society. The essay examines the catalyst to re-examine the eugenics movement, the influence of Darwinian thought upon its development, the political and institutional support for its growth, the relationship between eugenics, sterilization, and sex, and how the twentieth-century promises of the science of better breeding was a precursor to the twenty-first-century promise of genetic engineering.