Book review: How to be a Conservative by Roger Scruton

There’s a passage early in this book in which Roger Scruton describes what the ascent of Margaret Thatcher in the late 1970s meant to him as a young academic, when his colleagues were, almost “to a man,” revolutionary socialists. While he didn’t buy the “free market rhetoric of the Thatcherites” wholesale, he says, he nevertheless “deeply sympathised with Thatcher’s motives.” And those motives, he thought, were authentically “conservative,” even if those of her “praetorian guard of economic advisors” were not. Conservatives in Scruton’s sense believe in private enterprise, the family, Christianity and the common law. The irony, however, is that the Thatcher government’s reforms unleashed forces that were corrosive of the very forms of “civil association” that conservatives like Scruton cherish. The result of the free market revolution in this country, he acknowledges resignedly, has been the rise of a “managerial class” and a “malign competition” by large firms to pass their costs on to consumers and taxpayers. The Marxist philosopher GA Cohen once wrote a paper entitled “A Truth in Conservatism.” Here, Scruton devotes a chapter to “The Truth in Socialism” and concedes that Karl Marx was right about one thing—not the theory of surplus value or the dictatorship of the proletariat, but about the tendency of the market to “commodify” human relations by putting a price on everything. In bourgeois society, Marx wrote, “all that is solid melts into air.” Scruton would be happy, you suspect, for that line to stand as an epigraph to his threnody for the values of rootedness and belonging. Bloomsbury, £17.99