Conservatism by Roger Scruton

Author:Roger Scruton
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

5

THE IMPACT OF SOCIALISM

By the end of the First World War the cultural conservatism sketched in the previous chapter had ceased to provide a coherent political programme. The old civilisation of Europe, with its supposedly organic rural society and Christian high culture, was widely distrusted as a guide to the future. It had become a faded idea, not to be exposed to the glare of politics, but to be carefully unfolded from time to time like a precious parchment in the literary twilight. Nowhere was this more evident than in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, where the war had started, and where the old order of things had collapsed entirely after the German and Austrian defeat. There emerged in Vienna and its former dependencies thereafter a literature of mourning that is without compare in modern times. Works like Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday, which Zweig began in 1934, Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, published posthumously in 1940, or Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March (1932), invoke a precious social order that was also an order in the soul, while in Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies, published in 1923, but already partly conceived in 1912, we find the greatest attempt in modern literature to discover meaning in the inner life, when the props of society and religion have been removed and only the ‘I’ remains, miraculously standing like a lone steeple above the ruins of all that once surrounded it.

Notwithstanding the disasters of the twentieth century, and in part because of them, that kind of cultural conservatism has continued to attract some of the best minds of Europe and America, remaining a vigorous if melancholy force in contemporary art and literature. But by the end of the nineteenth century the political philosophy of conservatism had turned in another direction. In its original form, as described in the first two chapters, conservatism was a response to classical liberalism, a kind of ‘yes, but…’ in answer to the ‘yes’ of popular sovereignty. It was a defence of inheritance against radical innovation, an insistence that the liberation of the individual could not be achieved without the maintenance of customs and institutions that were threatened by the single-minded emphasis on freedom and equality. By the end of the nineteenth century conservatism had begun to define itself in another way, as a response to the gargantuan schemes for a ‘just’ society, to be promoted by the new kind of managerial state. In this battle conservatism became, to a great measure, the true defender of liberty, against what was at best a rising system of bureaucratic government, at worst, as in the Soviet Union, a tyranny yet more murderous than that of the Jacobins in revolutionary France.

In the course of the confrontation with socialism and its egalitarian supporters in America, the word ‘liberal’ changed meaning, a point on which I have already touched in Chapter 1. It is important to understand this development, since it has entirely transformed both the language and the practice of politics in America and also across the Western world.

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