The Conscience of the Conservative

It has been just over two years since the English philosopher, political thinker, and man of letters Roger Scruton lost his short, grueling battle with cancer. Scruton was a philosopher in the rich, capacious sense that predates the narrow disciplinary, and sub-disciplinary, distinctions that dominate and, in crucial respects, deform the contemporary university. He aimed at a comprehensive or “architectonic” grasp of the human condition without losing an appreciation of the irreducible mystery at the heart of things.

In his lucid and succinct “Preface” to Against the Tide, an authoritative and wide-ranging collection of the English writer’s journalism, columns, review essays, and occasional diary entries written between 1971 and 2019, Scruton’s literary executor, the Irish philosopher and journalist Mark Dooley, suggestively compares Scruton to the German philosopher Hegel. Scruton, like Hegel at his best, saw the intellectual life as “a spiritual endeavor to synthesize art, music, religion, politics, and philosophy.”

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