An Intellectual History of Roger Scruton's Thought

Abstract

This is an attempt both to systematise and to contextualise the thought of Roger Scruton. In the former endeavour, it is a sympathetic work. I have looked to see order between his texts, and I have argued for its substantial reality. One of the major theses which this work puts forward is that Scruton is not an occasional writer but is possessive of a high degree of systematicity. His thought is intelligible as the development of a position. The other attempt of this work is the looking for contexts in which to understand Scruton’s thought. In this endeavour, this thesis is an imaginative and an historical work. The kind of understanding offered regards the sense which can be given to the developments in Scruton’s thought. There are three contexts of major importance. Firstly, there is the analytic philosophy of the emotions, and of practical reason, after the later Wittgenstein. Scruton is part of that tradition of reading the Philosophical Investigations through an Aristotelian lens. Scruton’s philosophy of culture is a special case of the general rehabilitation of the éducation sentimental in the likes of G. E. M. Anscombe, Stuart Hampshire, or Bernard Williams. The second context, that of the ‘Peterhouse Right’, illuminates the distinctiveness of Scruton’s wielding of this virtue ethicist use of Wittgenstein into a political thought concerned with stores of practical reason. In other words, the sources of the emotional education which Scruton conceives are alike to the sources of practical reason conceived by the other figures of the ‘Peterhouse Right’. His development on the tradition of analytic virtue ethics is intelligibly ‘Peterhouse’. The ‘Peterhouse Right’ has been a controversial and a nebulous concept. It is part of the significance of this present work that I offer a new way of understanding this notion, which gives it philosophical substance and which sheds contextual light on Scruton’s work. Thirdly, the context of the Soviet experience, of the 1980s, makes intelligible Scruton’s philosophy of the sacred. Above all, it is in the I-Thou encounter that Scruton located the experience of divine authority. His political thought’s erotic- sacred core is a response to the impersonality of the USSR. That is to say, the vision of the state, developed over the 1970s, is one of aesthetics reflecting ends, such that personality is made possible. From the mid-1980s, in what looks like a response to his experiences in the Communist Eastern Bloc, the state acquires a discernible core. This is a public religion, the basic feature of which is that it makes intelligible I-Thou love. In his final thirty years, c. 1990-2020, Scruton develops a complete philosophy of religion. This centres on the ritual re-enactment of self-sacrifice, which is the amplification and embodiment of the response to the seeing of the other. Moreover, Scruton becomes an historicist. The depicted myth, which makes possible the artefact of personality, must be salient to its contemporary viewers. This historicism, plausibly, is the fruit of Scruton’s engagement with Peter Fuller’s notion of the ‘imperfectly modern’. Scruton’s philosophy can be summarised as a philosophy of culture. And this is culture in the sense of the bases for Bildung. That is to say, Scruton’s concern is for the artefact of personality, in much the way that it was Hegel’s concern in The Philosophy of Right. This work presents Scruton’s philosophy of culture as a cohesive whole. It pays attention to the moments in which it develops, and it seeks to give historical sense to the turns it takes.