"He has quoted with approval from Joseph de Maistre, the French arch-reactionary, but hesitates to follow him to the conclusion that the public hangman is the key figure of the social order. And this illuminates an emptiness at the core of this amazing book. It is, as he says at the outset, a work of pure dogmatic. De Maistre thought that God wanted the sort of autocracy he described. Mr Scruton offers no sanction for his fearsome, static hierarchy. Religion may be encouraged, if it tightens the social bond, but is ultimately dispensable. Neither does he provide an anthropology suggesting that authoritarianism is the natural condition of the human race. His destructive criticism of liberal society has a black brilliance: his vision of the Leviathan which should replace it simply floats in the air. He asserts it is "natural"; he does not tell us why."
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Novelists from EnglandPhilosophers from EnglandUniversity of Cambridge facultyLawyers from EnglandComposers from England
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Article is partly a review of the original edition of The Meaning of Conservatism (1980).
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Roger_Scruton
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Roger Scruton
Roger Scruton (27 February 1944 – 12 January 2020) was a British philosopher, who worked as an academic, editor, publisher, barrister, journalist, broadcaster, countryside campaigner, novelist, and composer.
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