Scruton's Illiberalism

In The Meaning of Conservatism, Roger Scruton, in the course of presenting what he takes to be conservatism, makes a number of interesting criticisms of other political views including, but not limited to, liberalism.¹

There are allusions to the common communitarian and conservative theme that liberalism caters only to (and may produce in practice) alienated, atomized individuals. There are suggestions as well, in some measure of tension with the foregoing, that such 'alienated' and 'solipsistic' individuals do not really exist, that a person's identity is constituted in large part by the social context in which he lives:

There is, to put it bluntly, something deeply self-deceived in the idea of a fulfilled human being whose style of life is entirely of his own devising. The cult of 'authenticity' – emphasizing the truth that the individual self is in some sense an artifact – espouses the self-contradictory position that it is by himself that he is made....Clearly the artifact of self is not of my making: it was cast first in the mould of a social arrangement and lives with that shape stamped permanently upon it, more or less distorted or embellished by later acts of choice.² (Scruton, pp. 37f.)

Given, however, that, insofar as he is engaged in criticism, liberalism is one of his major targets, it is somewhat surprising that he does little to say just what liberalism is. There may be several reasons for this, ranging from an assumption that his audience will know what he means by liberalism to an implicit claim that, in the notion that all obligations must rest on consent, he has identified and shown to be untenable something common to all varieties of liberalism. (Scruton, p. 29) Whatever the explanation, the absence of an explicit account makes it more difficult than it might otherwise be to understand his criticisms and assess their bearing.

In an effort to engage his arguments, I shall try to outline, in broad strokes, a recognizable version of liberalism.³ With that kind of picture in place, it will then be possible to see more clearly whether and to what extent his criticisms are damaging.

The most helpful general characterization of liberalism that I know is provided by Ronald Dworkin. On his account, the liberal holds that "government must be neutral on what might be called the questions of the good life....[P]olitical decisions must be, so far as is possible, independent of any particular conception of the good life, or of what gives value to life." (Dworkin, p. 191)

There are limits, of course, signalled by the phrase, "so far as is possible." The point, bluntly stated, is that if, for example, your conception of a good life includes head-breaking, then you will have trouble getting along with people whose own conceptions don't include having their heads broken. But apart from a case of that sort – and there's been plenty of debate about what gets counted as an example of a case of that sort – liberals have felt that people should be left to their own devices to follow their own visions of a good life.

Historically, this perspective has worked itself out in terms of a number of themes which I wish to highlight briefly.

The first is something that may be called the assumption of Public Reason. Liberals have recognized that, in any ongoing society, some matters have to be widely or universally agreed upon. It is assumed that people can be gotten to agree upon these things by appeal to facts, considerations and arguments that are in principle available to everyone alike.⁴

A second assumption has been a belief in the feasibility of Progress.⁵ As a political movement, liberalism has endeavored to take seriously criticisms of the status quo. It has not generally been willing to assume that its ideals were perfectly (or as perfectly as was feasible) realized in some existing society. In consequence, it has thought largely in terms of what might be done to improve a society, insofar as such improvement could be consonant with respecting, rather than over-riding, disparate conceptions of the good life.

A third assumption might be called the Reform Premise. The claim is that society is not holistic either in the sense that we have to understand everything in order to change anything or in the sense that we can't (usefully or satisfactorily) change anything without changing everything. In effect, this marks out a middle ground for the liberal between conservatives who wish to avoid or resist any change that doesn't arise organically from the existing state of affairs⁶ and radicals or revolutionaries who are inclined to think that small or piecemeal changes are bound to be, whether through anyone's explicit intentions or not, coopted and therefore only cosmetic. That is, the liberal can criticize the existing order and work for changes in it – can be a reformer – without threatening to tear a society apart.

Taken together, these themes add up to or express something that can be called Individualism. Liberals have held that law, political arrangements, government – the kinds of decisions and social structures that all have to put up with whether they like them or not – can, in general and in principle, be justified to the people who have to put up with them.⁷

Given this sketch of the meaning of liberalism, what is Scruton's critique? He introduces it with a discussion of "a recent and now seemingly irrepressible political idea, the idea that there can be 'no obligation on any man which ariseth not from some act of his own' as Thomas Hobbes once put it."⁸ (Scruton, p. 29) The idea is "that there must be, at the heart of all political, and indeed all social organization, something in the nature of a contract ... which, as it were, arises from social intercourse..." (Scruton, p. 29)

As posing a problem for this sort of view, Scruton points to the obligations associated with family life. "[I]t would be absurd," he says, "to think of family ties as contractual, or family obligations as in any way arising from a free relinquishing of autonomy, or even from some unspoken bargain which rises into consciousness, so to speak, at some later stage. Even as a metaphor, the language of contract here fails to make contact with the facts." (Scruton, p. 31)

This seems plausible, though there may be liberals who do not find it absurd to view family relations and obligations as somehow contractual or quasi-contractual.⁹ The obligations obtaining between a parent and child might be construed as some sort of exchange: roughly, some measure of deference and obedience in exchange for some measure of protection and care. There are problems with such a construal, though, on at least two counts. In the first place, it seems not to capture the felt urgency and emotional tone of the obligations. A father does not (normally) just feel that he owes certain things to a child in view of the way the child has behaved, is behaving or is expected to behave. Rather, he feels that he has a very special obligation to his own child that extends beyond and requires more of him than anything he might have agreed to on the basis of any hypothetical reciprocation. Second, in other contexts, where talk of contract or of implied contract is plausible – say, in an ongoing relation between two adults – we would not admit that deference and obedience (in the absence of some more explicit agreement) entitled one party to continuing support and care from the other. If the case is different in parent-child relations, then there must be some additional factor giving rise to the obligation there that does not appear in a contractual model.

Thus far, then, I agree with Scruton that a contractual model does not work well here. What, though, is its bearing on liberalism? I think Scruton would argue that it has a bearing in (at least) three ways. In the first place, it shows that the liberal is simply wrong if he thinks that there are no obligations that are non-consensual in origin.

Second and more broadly, in showing that there are some non-consensual obligations, it suggests that there may be others. (And these others may be of the same kind in that they attach particular persons to particular others or perhaps to particular historically embodied institutions and social structures rather than binding people to the observance of abstractly statable principles.)

Third and deepest, he would argue that the explanation for our having obligations of this sort is that our identity is constituted in large part by our embeddedness in a social context. Hence, what we are involves us in accepting the normative relevance of certain institutions and social structures. It is not up to us, even in principle, to detach ourselves from and "freely" choose to be bound or not by certain obligations. As he puts it,

Naturally, one's neighbors may interfere with one, to a greater or lesser extent, but until we are given some concrete description of the social and political arrangement, it is impossible to say whether more or less of this interference is desirable. The 'interference' proper to a rural community in Zululand is greater than anything experienced in a Soviet city. Yet it would be sadly misguided to call it a loss of freedom, when subjection to this kind of interference is precisely what it is to be a Zulu. And as soon as there is interference, there is a form of rule.... Without some move in this direction ... a person is neither free nor unfree, but lives ... in a perpetual hallucination of freedom that can be translated only into solipsistic acts. (Scruton, p. 47)

The first of these, I think, need not deeply trouble the liberal. There are two reasons. First, the account of liberalism I have provided admits that there can be non-consensual obligations, at least in the form of restrictions on what may be done in the attempt to realize a conception of a good life. Second, there is nothing about liberalism, either as characterized above or in the practice of large numbers of its adherents, that requires the liberal to think that liberalism provides a comprehensive moral theory. He aspires to provide a satisfactory political theory, one that has some kind of moral underpinning, but need not maintain that all our obligations are political.

The second of Scruton's arguments is only suggestive until it is said just what other obligations than those to which we consent we actually have. (And again, some such obligations are already allowed for within liberal theory.) Since that is what the third argument focuses upon, that is where attention should be directed.

With the third argument, I again find myself in a considerable measure of agreement. Plainly, we do not emerge from the womb as fully-formed free personalities, ready to undertake obligations on the basis of consent. Rather, we are born into and, in the course of education, maturation and introduction to customary and traditional practices, deeply shaped by an already existing social context. We have commitments long before we are able to reflect upon them or contemplate alternatives. Even at the point – which entirely decent people may never reach or undergo – at which we reflectively consider the commitments that we have and what alternatives there might be, we assess those alternatives in terms of the commitments we already hold, for we have nothing else in terms of which to do so.¹⁰

This is an important part, though not, I think, the whole, of what should find a place in a comprehensive moral theory. The question that faces us at this point is whether it leads us in the direction that Scruton thinks. I think that there are at least three reasons for suspecting that it does not.

First, if our commitments and therefore our obligations are shaped by the families, communities, societies and nations into which we are born, it can hardly have escaped Scruton's notice that the societies and nations into which the vast majority of his audience has been born are liberal societies and nations. By conservative standards, then, it is in developing and working out the intimations implicit in liberal societies that we best express, and honor (at least some of) the unchosen obligations of our socially embedded and constituted selves.

Second, liberalism requires that government, law and political arrangements be neutral among conceptions of the good life. It does not require or presuppose that everyone (or anyone) else will be. Liberalism does not forbid people from finding or pursuing a vision of a good life in concert with others. It does not require that they not find the meaning of their lives in such a context or that they not view themselves as being bound by the commitments they acquire in such communities. It only requires that they allow others to do the same, whether they share exactly the same sorts of communities or not and subject to some general rules – the unchosen obligations of a liberal society – designed to prevent clashes between individuals differently committed and communities differently constituted.

Third, there is a question of which Scruton admits the legitimacy (given sufficient information about concrete social arrangements) but tells us little about how to answer. (Scruton, p. 47) That question is: How far is too far? How far may a community go in constituting itself in accordance with a shared vision of a good life? May it, for example, burn witches? Or, from a different perspective, to what extent may a community in which I live impose upon me an obligation, alleged to be derived from my identity as a socially embedded being, that I do not recognize or admit to be one of my own commitments? There may be some other answer that is not simply totalitarian, but it seems to me that the most plausible answer is also liberalism's answer: The rights of the community in this regard are quite limited and probably extend at most to expulsion or ostracism so long as I am willing to keep, say, my religious heterodoxy to myself.

Though we are all shaped, morally and otherwise, by the communities in which we were born and raised, there is no one community that we all share – and therefore no single set of unchosen obligations we share – short of the national and international communities in which we live and which are, for most of us, liberal communities. For a world like that (a world like ours!), liberalism at least proposes a solution that need not eventuate in violence and war. Scruton's conservatism does not.

Dworkin, Ronald. "Liberalism" in A Matter of Principle. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985; 181-204.

Frankel, Charles. The Case for Modern Man. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1956.

Scruton, Roger. The Meaning of Conservatism. New York: Penguin, 1980.

1. Liberalism is not his only target. Rather, he thinks of conservatism as avoiding an interconnected set of errors common to a number of contemporary political ideologies, hence his frequent references to Marxism. (For that matter, he might well be uncomfortable with having conservatism classed as an ideology on a par with others at all.)

2. Scruton claims here that he is referring to a "fulfilled human being," but plainly, if his arguments are correct, they would apply to any developed character, not just to the fulfilled.

3. It is, of course, important that the position to be sketched be a recognizable version of liberalism. There has been and still is much controversy about what liberalism really is, which is hardly surprising given that the object of the attempted characterization is a set of political ideas that have attracted widespread support under a variety of differing historical circumstances over a period of approximately three centuries. Nonetheless, a position that was merely labeled 'liberalism' without being able, reasonably comfortably, to accommodate the political views (or most of the views) of those who have regarded themselves and been regarded by others as liberals, could have little if any weight in an argument with a conservative (or any other) critic.

4. This assumption, whether stated or not, is no doubt one of the factors that has made liberalism predominantly a secular ideology. Whatever his personal convictions, a liberal typically recognizes that, in matters of faith, it is rarely possible to secure widespread agreement just by argument and is therefore unwilling to rely upon such arguments with respect to political issues.

5. In some cases, notably in the late eighteenth century, this took the form of an assertion that progress was not only possible but inevitable. But surely, that is not, except perhaps under extraordinary circumstances, defensible. What is important for liberalism is not the assumption that progress is easy or inevitable but just that it is not insuperably difficult.

6. It has never been clear to me why change that arises from criticism of and attempts to improve an existing order does not count as "organic." It is undeniable that there can be and have been excesses. Proposals for change have sometimes been precipitously implemented without due attention to longer term and indirect consequences of the implementation, but the remedy for that, to the extent that there is one, seems at least as likely to lie in putting more effort into being duly attentive as it is to lie in resisting change or criticism.

7. Though I find Dworkin's account of the meaning of liberalism more concise, the foregoing outline is also heavily indebted to Frankel's in The Case for Modern Man. Especially, see his summary statement on p. 47.

I think it provides a useful characterization of what almost all liberals have had in common. No doubt, it is clear, both from what I have chosen to include and from what I have omitted, where my sympathies lie.

8. It is odd that Scruton should call this idea recent since there appear hints of it, at least, in Glaucon's contractarian account of justice in Plato's Republic. The word commonly translated "justice" there actually refers to something much wider than what we typically associate with that term, something much closer in meaning to our term, "morality." One might be tempted to say, borrowing a term of which conservatives are fond, that the idea that Scruton calls recent has been intimated in certain aspects of Western political thought for almost as long as there has been such a thing as Western political thought.

9. There may also be some liberals who are skeptical about whether ordinary assumptions about the obligations associated with family life are justified if they have no contractual or quasi-contractual underpinning. I do not share their skepticism and hence shall take it for granted that those assumptions are a reliable (not infallible) guide to the obligations we really do have.

10. I do not mean to suggest that we are simply stuck with an unrevisable set of commitments; I do not believe that we are. The point is that we can't change them all at once, not that we can't change them at all.