2018, ISBN: 1250170567

[EAN: 9781250170569], Gebraucht, guter Zustand, [PU: Scruton, Roger], Excerpt. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.ConservatismAn Invitation to the Great TraditionBy Roger Scruto… Plus…

[EAN: 9781250170569], Gebraucht, guter Zustand, [PU: Scruton, Roger], Excerpt. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.ConservatismAn Invitation to the Great TraditionBy Roger Scruton St. Martin's PressCopyright 2017 Horsell's Morsels Ltd.All rights reserved.ISBN: 978-1-250-17056-9ContentsTitle Page,Copyright Notice,PREFACE,1 PRE-HISTORY,2 THE BIRTH OF PHILOSOPHICAL CONSERVATISM,3 CONSERVATISM IN GERMANY AND FRANCE,4 CULTURAL CONSERVATISM,5 THE IMPACT OF SOCIALISM,6 CONSERVATISM NOW,Further reading and bibliography,Notes,Also by Roger Scruton,About the Author,Copyright,CHAPTER 1PRE-HISTORYModern conservatism is a product of the Enlightenment. But it calls upon aspects of the human condition that can be witnessed in every civilisation and at every period of history. Moreover, it is heir to a philosophical legacy at least as old as the Greeks. Aristotle, in the Politics, defended constitutional government in terms that are as influential among conservative thinkers today as they were in the ancient world. Indeed, most of the ideas purveyed by modern conservatives are foreshadowed in Aristotle's great work. But they have been adapted to a situation that Aristotle himself could not have foreseen, which is the emergence of the nation state, the loss of a unifying religion, and the growth of the 'great society', composed of millions of cooperating strangers under a single rule of law.It is a repeated error among intellectual historians to assume that ideas have a self-contained history of their own, and that one idea gives rise to another in something like the way one weather system gives rise to the next. Marxists, who regard ideas as by-products of economic forces, commit the opposite error, dismissing the intellectual life as entirely subservient to material causes. The vast and destructive influence of Marxist theory is a clear disproof of what it says. As the American conservative Richard Weaver put it, in the title of a famous and influential book, Ideas Have Consequences (1948), and this is as true of conservative ideas as it is of ideas propagated on the left. To understand the pre-history of conservatism, therefore, one should accept that ideas have a far-reaching influence over human affairs; but one should recognise also that they do not arise only from other ideas, and often have roots in biological, social and political conditions that lie deeper than rational argument.We human beings live naturally in communities, bound together by mutual trust. We have a need for a shared home, a place of safety where our claim to occupancy is undisputed and where we can call on others to assist us in times of threat. We need peace with our neighbours and the procedures for securing it. And we need the love and protection afforded by family life. To revise the human condition in any of those respects is to violate imperatives rooted in biology and in the needs of social reproduction. But to conduct political argument as though these factors are too far from the realm of ideas to deserve a mention is to ignore all the limits that must be borne in mind, if our political philosophy is to be remotely believable. It is precisely the character of modern utopias to ignore these limits - to imagine societies without law (Marx and Engels), without families (Laing), without borders or defences (Sartre). And much conservative ink has been wasted (by me among others) in rebutting such views, which can be believed only by people who are unable to perceive realities, and who therefore will never be persuaded by argument.Let us begin, therefore, by listing some of the features of the human condition that define the limits of political thinking and that, most conservatives will claim, are given due prominence in their philosophy. First among these features is social membership. Human beings live in communities, and depend on communities for their safety and happiness. In a tribal society people relate to each other through kinship (which may be partly mythical); in a religious, Books<