Roger Scruton's Critique of Liberalism

Liberalism is a term with many overlapping senses. In one sense it denotes an attitude towards (and also a theory of) the state and its functions; in another use it denotes a moral outlook, which sometimes rises to the level of theory, but which for the most part remains hidden in the crannies of everyday existence. Its guiding principle is tolerance—although, as its critics do not fail to say, its tolerance towards non-liberals is quickly exhausted. In all its forms, liberalism incorporates an attitude of respect towards the individual existence—an attempt to leave as much moral and political space around every person as its compatible with the demands of social life. As such it has been thought to imply a kind of egalitarianism. For by its very nature, the respect which liberalism shows to the individual, it shows to each individual equally. Partiality is a form of intolerance; by enlarging the space around one person, it diminishes the space enjoyed by his neighbor. In the perfect liberal suburb, the gardens are of equal size, even though decked out with the greatest possible variety of plastic gnomes.

-Roger Scruton, The Meaning of Conservatism 

Roger Scruton is the kind of right-wing thinker you don’t often see anymore: sweepingly erudite, capable of engaging seriously with the intellectual opposition, and willing to take principled stands against the team. Commenting on Donald Trump, Scruton diagnosed him as a “product of the cultural decline that is rapidly consigning our artistic and philosophical inheritance to oblivion.” I couldn’t have said it better myself; though I’ve tried. Of course Scruton was unremitting and often acidic in his condemnations of liberalism, the left, and Lady Gaga. But unlike contemporaries such the latter day Jordan Peterson or Gad “My Testicular Fortitude is Off the Charts” Saad, Scruton was a serious and thoughtful philosopher whose views warrant careful engagement. We aren’t due to see his like again, and public discourse is much the poorer for it. 

Scruton was prolific, publishing dozens of books and articles over a long career. An essay trying to cover the range of his thinking could only distort it (though I’ve responded to different facets here and there).  I’m going to focus on Scruton’s core arguments against liberalism. These operate at a high level, moving from well thought out metaphysical and anthropological objections to political and aesthetic critiques. Of course nothing is better than going back to the original source, and there are few more rewarding ways to spend time than reading Scruton. Even if liberals do so for the purpose of knowing our enemy. In the conclusion I’ll offer some thoughts on why a left-liberal approach answers many of his objections and offers a higher course forward than Scruton’s conservatism. 

Liberalism’s flawed metaphysics and anthropology 

The moral truth that our obligations are derived from the I-You relation is founded on a metaphysical truth, which is that the self is a social product. It is only because we enter into free relations with others that we can know ourselves in the first person. The arguments for this metaphysical conclusion are many, and two in particular appeal to me. One is the argument from language, associated with Wittgenstein, the other is the argument from recognition, associated with Hegel.

-Roger Scruton, On Human Nature 

Scruton drew on a wide array of theoretical influences in the Western canon: Kant, Wittgenstein, T.S Eliot etc. But arguably the two most significant guides who shaped his politics were Edmund Burke and Georg Hegel. Scruton frequently singled Hegel out for special praise. In Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition Scruton argues that “Hegel’s political philosophy evolved into the most systematic presentation that we have of the conservative vision of political order.”

This is echoed in How to Be a Conservative when Scruton reiterates that the “fundamental philosophy” of conservatism “has never been better captured than by Hegel in the Phenomenology of Spirit, which shows how self-consciousness and freedom emerge through the venture out of the self toward the other; how relations of conflict and domination are overcome by the recognition of rights and duties, and how, in the course of this, the individual achieves not only freedom of action but also a sense of his own and other’s value.” Very high praise. In this respect Scruton belongs to a lineage of right-leaning Anglo-Hegelians and idealists who were inspired by the great German idealist: from F.H Bradley to Michael Oakeshott and Paul Gottfried today.

Scruton believes he’s following Hegel in rejecting the atomistic conception of self-identity liberal philosophy is accused of fetishizing (though as we’ll see, this may not be entirely so in the latter case). The atomistic conception of self-identity  has a kind of abstract universalism Scruton will often critically associate with the “Kantian idea of the free, autonomous being” in The Meaning of Conservatism. This atomistic conception of self-identity sees the individual as existing prior to the particular communities into which she is born, and consequently having a morally weighty identity entirely independent of that community. This conception of self-identity is universal precisely because it is all but contentless-liberals think that individuals come into the world as more or less the same kind of rational agent. Untainted by any of the prejudices and biases that accrue from becoming embedded in all too particular traditions. 

Oftentimes, Kant and other more idealist leaning liberals notwithstanding, Scruton notes how this liberal metaphysics of the self is complemented by a kind of ontological and normative materialism. Since liberals tend to think of the individual as primary, they are attracted to forms of scientific rationalism and empiricism that hold that existing human beings in the world of natural facts are what is truly real. Meanwhile the societies, traditions,  nations, states and laws we create are ultimately social constructions designed to gratify our private hedonistic desires. This thinner ontological status also bleeds into the liberal conviction that abstract nations and creeds are of less moral significance than the wants and needs of the actually existing individuals who constitute them.

This atomistic conception of self-identity will usually be cashed out as a kind of egalitarianism. Liberal scientific materialists will insist that we’re all the same kind of animal in the end. Hobbes’ brutal characterization of human beings as more or less entirely equal in the state of nature, physically and mentally all but homologous, is exemplary. Hobbes’ proto-liberal materialist evolves into the Benthamite view that we are all equal but self-interested hedonists who must either pursue our gratifications without consideration for others, or little Peter Singers who insist we must be radically self-sacrificing to mechanically maximize utility for even those with whom we have little in common. Either way a good utilitarian weighs each person’s happiness equally; all count for one, and no more than one. On the other end of the spectrum more dignified Kantian liberals, for whom Scruton tends to have a lot more respect, reject a kind of reductionist materialism. 

They think that the equality of humanity lies in our shared capacity to reason and make choices about the kinds of good life we want to live. Because we are all equals we should rule ourselves, since someone who is our equal is not entitled to treat their fellows as unequals. Indeed for some liberals the value of moral behavior arises in no small part because it is chosen, with any imposed obligations inevitably distorting the authenticity or integrity of moral acts. Kant’s insistence in The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals that the only unambiguously good thing in existence is the good will is a telling example. 

Liberal rationalism 

Whichever flavor you prefer, Scruton reads liberals as arguing we come into the world as more or less the same kind of rational beings. From this metaphysical and anthropological position emerges the argument that we should be free to develop the identity of our selfhood through personal choices with minimal constraint. John Stuart Mill’s liberal socialist defense of “experiments in living” where the self’s expressive identity becomes a primary aesthetic and ethical project for liberated individuals is paradigmatic.

On this view a hierarchical society that insists it has the right to judge and constrain your personal choices is one where powerful oppressors believe they are entitled to determine the identifying features of your selfhood. Liberals think this is a very great wrong; even based on a metaphysical error for failing to recognize the individual is more real than the social relations into which they should ideally become embedded only through choice. 

By contrast, Scruton argued that the individual is very much the product of the society into which they are born. As he put it in The Meaning of Conservatism “individuality too is an artifact, an achievement which depends on the social life of the people.” Following Hegel, Burke and others, Scruton argues one’s self-identity is created through our very particular associations with others. I am a member of this family, come to speak the English language, drank Keiths Red and watched hockey in my hometown of Stittsville, Ontario with my mostly conservative bros and adopted mannerisms characteristic of the Canadian nation (so sorry about the long digression). Each of these molded my self-identity. Strip that social life  away to make me into one of Hobbes indistinguishable self-interested hedonists or Kant’s universal law givers and there would be nothing left of me of metaphysical interest. 

Indeed, Scruton points out if the story liberals told were true we’d have never survived. None of us actually come into the world as self-interested competitors or universal law givers. We enter the world, and perennially remain, dependent on one another from the need for our parents onward. Indeed Scruton was so emphatic on this point in How to Be a Conservative he even argued that the “truth in socialism” lies in the “truth of our mutual dependence, and of the need to do what we can to spread the benefits of social membership to those whose own efforts do not suffice to obtain them.” Ironically socialists and conservatives recognized this truth where liberals did not, even if Scruton thinks the former made even more terrible mistakes.

Allegiance is the basis of society

The relationship of these metaphysical ideas to Scruton’s political conservatism is spelled out numerous times across his work. Once one recognizes that “individuality” is an artifact, one recognizes the falsity of the liberal vision of society as an aggregate of individuals who pursue their self-interest, sometimes cooperatively, sometimes competitively. Scruton rejects the idea that the state is legitimated primarily through providing a social and legal framework to protect natural rights or liberties. The state and society are legitimated above all else through allegiance, as he puts it in The Meaning of Conservatism:

It is allegiance which defines the condition of society, and which constitutes society as something greater than the ‘aggregate of individuals’ that the liberal mind perceives. It is proper for conservatives to be skeptical of claims made on behalf of the value of the individual, if these claims should conflict with the allegiance necessary to society, even though they may wish the state (in the sense of the apparatus of government) to stand in a fairly loose relation to the activities of individual citizens.

This point is reiterated in a different idiom in How to Be a Conservative, where Scruton proposed that conservatism rejects the liberal account of legitimacy grounded in rights which enable the free pursuit of individual self-interest. Figures like Burke, Hegel and De Maistre felt that gluing together society on such a flimsy basis would inevitably lead to its disintegration as self-interest and critical reason tugged in very different directions. A nation-state can’t be like a partnership in pepper or coffee. Scruton proposes:

Conservatism, as I understand it, means the maintenance of the social ecology. Individual freedom is certainly a part of that ecology, since without it social organisms cannot adapt. But freedom is not the sole or true goal of politics. Conservatism involves the conservation of our shared resources-social, material, economic, and spiritual-and resistance to social entropy in all its forms.

This isn’t to say rights are unimportant.  In The Meaning of Conservatism Scruton tends to follow Burke in seeing rights as established largely through traditional conventions. In The Soul of the World Scruton comes close to endorsing a quasi-liberal view of “natural” negative rights to be left alone. Unfortunately it is never entirely clear which view Scruton finally came down on and there are differences. Rights established by convention are guaranteed unequally, and of course can be reframed by convention.

That might appear dangerous, but there is no other way to solidify allegiance as your primary political principle without subordinating the demands of liberty this way. By contrast if you insist that some negative rights are simply natural, the implication would be that if they corrode our ties of allegiance so be it. If I want to exercise my right to free speech by burning a flag and saying fuck King Charles (and I do want to say the latter) it is what it is. More problematic still is the libertarian point about mobility rights and immigration.  If rights to be left alone are natural to all human beings its not clear why, for instance, the state is entitled to inhibit the mobility rights of law-abiding migrants who want to move to a new country. But in either case Scruton thinks the state’s legitimacy is grounded in much more than securing simple rights to be left alone, or even worse provisioning various positive rights to “specific benefits.” 

As the ecological metaphor suggests, Scruton views the state as an organic community.  In On Human Nature he follows Hegel in drawing a symmetry between being born into the family, towards which we have an “unchosen obligation” of obedience and respect. The same logic then applies “toward the state, which surrounds and protects all our arrangements, by offering the security and permanence of law. The bond of allegiance that ties us to the state is again a bond of piety—not dissimilar to the quasi-contract between the living, the unborn, and the dead of which Burke writes so movingly in his answer to Rousseau.”

This echoes the views of other important conservative authors like Russell Kirk. In The Roots of American Order Kirk insisted that “..order is the first need of the soul. It is not possible to love what Between God and Baal one ought to love, unless we recognize some principles of order by which to govern ourselves. Order is the first need of the commonwealth. It is not possible for us to live in peace with one another, unless we recognize some principle of order by which to do justice. The good society is marked by a high degree of order, justice, and freedom. Among these, order has primacy: for justice cannot be enforced until a tolerable civil social order is attained, nor can freedom be anything better than violence until order gives us laws.” 

Of course one might contest that such filial characterizations of allegiance to the state—what even steely eyed Nietzsche once called “the coldest of cold monsters”— should strike even sympathetic readers as chilling. An emphasis on “allegiance” and order might sound homely and calming, especially to those yearning for submission. That is until one reflects on the fact that since the origins of Western political thought in Plato and Socrates—the latter put on trial for undermining faith in the Gods of the city—it has been justice, not order, that have been taken to be first virtues of social institutions.

One might insist that order is a basic precondition for justice. Even morally and socially prior to it. But experience would expose this as a very dangerous conceit, given the historical record of right wing authoritarianism.  Moreover, the state and society are often conceived as a kind of organic entity by conservative thinkers. This  hypostasizes solidity to the state and is contrasted with the allegedly fragile basis of the liberal state in freedom and equality. Though why it is less abstract to reify a state or national society as a very mysterious living entity rather than in terms of an explicitly hypothetical social contract or as ideally a system of cooperation is frequently unclear.  

This has concrete bearing. On the topic of right-wing authoritarians, Scruton’s attitude could often be concerningly soft. In The Meaning of Conservatism Scruton criticizes Pinochet for violent excesses. But he also offers a taciturn “defense of those, like Chile’s General Pinochet, who have had to make the choice between violently establishing an order in which natural justice has a chance, and acquiescing in the ongoing violence and degradation of a society devoted to ‘social justice.”

No doubt the thousands killed by the coup launching, torture loving General might have a thing to say about the disorderly degradation he brought to Chile. In the same book Scruton laments that Franco was “not successful in Spain: he merely held up the liberal enlightenment”—in essence a disappointment not with the murder of hundreds of thousands, but with the failure to get the right results from it. Before his death Scruton also had a cozy relationship with tin-pot autocrats like Victor Orban, who seems to have decided that amongst the “unchosen obligations” of the Hungarian people is a perennial obligation to elect him and his increasingly corrupt party into office. 

In The Soul of the World Scruton poetically chimes that “not all of our obligations are freely undertaken, and created by choice. Some we receive ‘from outside the will.’ . . . It is hardly surprising, therefore, if they are wound into the order of things by moments of sacrificial awe.” Such sublime rhetoric can’t help but inspire when one thinks of martyrs for transformative justice like Martin Luther King. But lacking a clear criteria of application, these calls for sacrifice can also remind one of Mary Wollstonecraft’s satire of Edmund Burke’s  “mortal antipathy to reason” where reason conflicted with the latter’s “Gothic notions of beauty.”

There’s no other response to arguing for people to sacrifice their beliefs, identities, and even lives out of an asserted and abstract “unchosen obligation” to a society or state they happened to be born into and yet which has never respected them or wanted them as a member. But that is of course what is entailed by Scruton’s rejection of “the altar of equality” when he condemned LGBTQ lifestyles, offered (later retracted) apologias for the Iraq war inspired by Western chauvinism, and expressed longstanding reservations about the religious acceptance of Islam. All this exposed the serious limitations of Scruton’s calls for “reciprocal obligations” both to fellow citizens and human beings who didn’t love as he wanted, believe as he wanted, or live under a government he admired.

National belonging 

Scruton’s response to these concerns is often to suggest that the state needs to be complemented by more affecting forms of communal allegiance. If we are to reside in an organic community, then its soul was to be provided by the nation. Scruton was an unapologetic nationalist. In A Political Philosophy: Arguments for Conservatism he has little patience for those of us who “suggest that nations are transient, with no god-given right to exist or natural legitimacy.” By contrast for conservatives “nationality is an achievement, a ‘winning through’ to an order that is both more stable and more open than the old creed communities and tribal atavisms which it replaces.” 

Scruton regards nations as emerging as another form of unchosen association as though through an “invisible hand.” They consist of “neighbours” in the sense of people who share a territory, and many other things as well: “language, customs, markets and (in European conditions) religion.” It is this shared national identity that helps suffuse the state and its unchosen obligations with an ethical spirit, to paraphrase Hegel. It creates a “we” that “gains its validity either from an immemorial past, or from a fictitious contract between people who already belong together.” The reason the contract is “fictitious” is the nation is not really entered into as a matter of choice or consent, which would suggest the revolutionary principle that consent could one day be withdrawn and the entire society remade.

The contract is at best something like the American constitutional convention or the English Bill of Rights; on Scruton’s reading making explicit principles, boundaries on state intrusion, and guarantees of rights already well established in the national tradition. That the American founders were, as Sheldon Wolin argued, revolutionaries twice over-overthrowing the centuries old ties to Britain and then abandoning one constitution to create another-doesn’t factor in. The fact that enduring institutions and rights were often borne out of sometimes decades long revolutionary agitation like the numerous English Civil Wars is an uncomfortable fact many conservatives, from Burke to Scruton, have tried to downplay. With no small popular success, even if at the great price of historical accuracy. 

Much like the family is a “we” to whom every individual has unchosen obligations, so to do we have obligations to the nation of which we are a member and whose state we reside in. As “citizens of nations state” we are “bound by reciprocal obligations to all those who can claim our nationality, regardless of family, and regardless of faith.” Scruton often expresses this in terms of “national loyalties” and contrasts it with the “panglossian universalism” of liberals like Kant who endorse a kind of bloodless and rootless cosmopolitanism. For Scruton, the ties of obligation we feel grow thinner the more distant they are perceived to be. Our obligations shine brightest when they are to our family, bright enough when to our nation and then only dimly to those who are geographically and ethnically distant from us. 

These earthy arguments can’t help but feel affecting when one thinks about the real pleasures of home, hearth, neighbourhood and stability. And there is truth in the fact that, as thinkers going back to Augustine reminded us, our immediate relationships do often take moral priority over those more distant.In no small part because we can have the most impact on those closest to us. But our ambition must be to continuously widen our circle of moral concern to all those whom it is actually due and not limit it due to arbitrary and contingent circumstances. 

Scruton wants to halt or slow this widening by insisting that there is nothing arbitrary or accidental about national membership. These arguments lose a lot of their luster when one recognizes how billions of people endure unremitting toil or face serious persecution and that we very much have it in our power to change that. Scruton thinks we should be wary of doing much for those who happen to be born on the wrong side of the contingent lines written on a map (and he already doesn’t think we should be doing much for those born on the right side, though Scruton did endorse a modest welfare state).

These lines were mostly drawn by Western imperialists who had no qualm about overstepping them when it was in their interest to do so. There are moments when Scruton’s homely nationalism takes on a quality that can only be described as a rather cloying, powdery, petite-bourgeois kind of disdain. Much like he could sometimes descend from careful critique of the left to the by now familiar shrill putdowns characteristic of too much right-wing commentary in these moments Scruton doesn’t live up to his high moral rhetoric. This is a feature, not a bug, of his worldview as a whole.  

Scruton is at his most Daily Mail when he pooh poohs our obligations to immigrants and asylum seekers. They “enjoy a subsidized existence from the moment of their arrival, the government being obliged by the UN Convention on Refugees and Asylum to offer hospitality at citizens’ expense.” He complains that “suddenly what was ours becomes theirs, and the discovery that there is nothing to be done to remedy the situation, that no law, court or government, can be appealed to and that the expropriation cannot therefore be peacefully ended, has a profound impact on people’s sense of identity.

An identity forged from a shared sense of home by its very nature is threatened by the person who comes to the home uninvited, and with a non-negotiable demand for sanctuary. You may not approve of that fact, but it is a fact nevertheless, and the principle cost of national loyalties.” One is tempted to say Scruton was welcome to explain this fact to those fleeing “unchosen” wars where their families faced death and worse in prisons and concentration camps around the globe. And no, not just from the former communist states whose refugees Scruton was willing to make an admirable exception for. Oftentimes from states, like Syria, which were badly destabilized by wars Scruton and other conservatives endorsed and wrought by chaos that is a legacy of colonial mismanagement by countries like France and Scruton’s own United Kingdom. Given this Scruton might have a little more sympathy for their suffering. A little less “I” and a little more “you.” 

The left-liberal response 

Scruton is right to emphasize the sociability of the human self. We are much closer to Aristotle, Hegel, or for that matter Marx’s social animals than Benthamite utility maximizers or Kantian lawgivers. Intellectually what Scruton misses is the extent to which liberal thinkers have long been aware of the deficiencies of what the liberal and socialist thinker C.B Macpherson called the “possessive individualism” of classical liberalism. This includes, for that matter, Scruton’s allegedly conservative hero Hegel. The late Prussian is more accurately described by Straussian Waller Newell in Tyranny and Revolution as endorsing a “moderate liberalism” out his conviction that “liberalism must be saved by being rounded in an ontology of intersubjectivity of which, left to itself, it is completely incapable.” In other words Hegel was the first in a long series of more mature Enlightenment liberals who recognized that the good of human embeddedness in community and tradition but also stressed its dangers.

For Hegel human beings undoubtedly have a need for ethical integration into communities. But his system was also radically sensitive to the historical contingency of those communities and how the yearning for greater freedom, equality, and the development of self-consciousness would lead to breaking their traditional societies and hierarchies apart when they no longer satisfied those needs. There is no denying the power of the Hegelian negative. More prominently, if we are communal and interdependent beings, it is hard to see how conservatism is the best expression of our nature. It was liberals, social democrats, and democratic socialists who built the great welfare states that gave teeth to our commitments to each another in a very material way. And conservatives who tried to roll them back by proclaiming there is no such thing as society so welfare queens aren’t entitled to squat.   

 If we follow Scruton in recognizing the sociality of human nature, a commitment to conservatism does not follow. Quite the opposite. In the 1980s Scruton was wary of Margaret Thatcher, who once said there is no such thing as society really only individuals and families (though he eventually came around). Left-liberals and progressives would note that the pairing of this aggressive, atomistic individualism with the broader right—including forms of national chauvinism popular on the right—is a far more natural pairing than the inverse. 

This is why there is a grain of truth in Ted Honderich’s otherwise untrue characterization of the right as little more than a dolled up defenses of vain selfishness in his Conservatism book; which Scruton reacted to with apoplectic fury. There is often an inherent chauvinism to right wing thinking which Scruton himself echoes in the insistence that we can prioritize, say, the ultimately abstract identitarian needs of our national community over even the far more urgent and even existentially concrete needs of others further away. Scruton often writes as though this kind of nationalist loyalty is contrary to individualistic forms of chauvinism. But very much the reverse has proven true. For Margaret Thatcher it was natural for individuals to put themselves first, then their families, and then the nation down the line.

The same is true for Trump, who sees nothing wrong with putting “America First” by curbing immigrants while appointing billionaires to cut social spending. This myopic chauvinism naturally maps onto the conservative support for anti-egalitarianism and its fetishization of hierarchy, as some are regarded as more worthy of moral consideration than others. Starting with myself and those I deem worthy, and potentially but not necessarily moving outwards .At each level I put myself first, then those I am immediately in contact with next, then potentially those who think and look and pray like me if there is time. And for plenty of conservatives that's the end of it, except in very rare circumstances where one deigns to support a more encompassing humanism. And of course my and our needs and wants are to be catered to first and exhaustively, even if that comes at the expense of ignoring or often actively exploiting others regarded as less worthy. 

The higher ethics of liberalism

There is a high price paid for anti-universalism of an especially muscular kind, and the price is paid in moral seriousness.. One of the reasons so much of contemporary conservatism comes across as very funny is precisely how this lack of moral seriousness translates outwards into forms of banal cruelty and preening machismo. The result is kind of spiritual regression very much at cross purposes with Scruton’s self-seriousness. The contemporary left-Hegelian and liberal Charles Taylor has observed how many conservatives decry the ethics of modernity for its libertine egalitarianism and failure to exalt higher order concerns with creed and country. But in his recent Cosmic Connections Taylor notes that the key Hegelian lesson is precisely that the ethics of liberal and progressive modernity are higher. 

This does not mean that human beings themselves are any less sinful than we’ve ever been, but only that our aspirations are more challenging. The liberal egalitarian outlook holds that we must conceive each person’s life, and perhaps even the lives of non-human animals, as being of equal mortal weight. Indeed, as possessing a dignity that places them beyond price. Taken seriously this imposes enormous practical obligations upon us; indeed so enormous that we’ve yet to conceive of the kind of liberal society that could realize them (though I think liberal socialism might be able to).  

Conservatives like Scruton often tacitly admit there is a “higher” quality to the liberal and progressive ethic when they perennially decry its “utopian” quality, or insist that it is simply a brute “fact” that people prioritize those who look like them over others. The implication is that liberalism and progressivism demand too much of us morally while conservatism is easier.  But even if that were true as a matter of fact that means conservatism is nothing to be proud of. And its certainly not true that such a conservatism asks more from us than liberalism or progressivism. It is appealing precisely because it always asks so much less of us. 

Featured image is Rethinking Open Society - Roger Scruton: Liberalism and Loyalty, by Adam Draskovics