The Conservative Imagination of Roger Scruton

Abstract

In the mid-1970s it became clear for conservative intellectuals in Britain that conservatism is in need of renewal, as its ideological counterparts, namely liberalism and leftism, had already provided for themselves their independent credentials, while conservatism tended to be confused with liberalism and, unlike leftism, had little if no appeal in academia. Roger Scruton was one of those intellectuals who has set out to overcome the conservative distaste to ideology and aversion to theorizing, attempting to reformulate the conservative dogma. The main difficulty for his endeavor is that dogma literary understood would necessarily contain ideas widely regarded as being out of day. So what is needed for conservatism today is not only a set of fixed ideas but first and foremost a kind of attitude toward reality which could awake sympathy in us for ways of life that are not and could not be ours. This view of things involves а version of “as if” philosophy, the mainstay of which is the concept of imagination. This concept is of special importance for those who analyze the limits of conservative persuasion today. The author contends that dealing with these limits Scruton makes use of the distinction between fancy and imagination in a way that makes possible for his unusual “work of dogmatics” to fit into the conservative tradition.