tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-142101882011-08-03T12:16:16.955+01:00Roger Scrutonnoreply@blogger.comBlogger511100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14210188.post-52284438781025994702009-01-13T14:08:00.003Z2009-01-13T14:17:14.355Z

New Website, 13 January 2009We are in the process of building a new website, one that is easier for us to manage and easier for you to find things, we hope. So, if you wish to start using it as a place to leave comments the address is: http://rogerscruton.wordpress.com/. We will eventually use the domain name 'rogerscruton.com' once we have got it going properly.The most recent Sunday Times

Roger Scrutonnoreply@blogger.com19tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14210188.post-42003472303886946122008-11-17T17:50:00.000Z2008-11-17T17:21:06.740Z

General comments?Please post them here.Thank you for your interest in my site.

Roger Scrutonnoreply@blogger.com63tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14210188.post-19640645596067931862008-11-17T17:15:00.002Z2008-11-17T17:47:43.261Z

Public Engagements, November 28, 2008. Conference begins at 10.30am on the theme of 'God and Good' organized at Heythrop College, Kensington Square, London W8 5HQ. Day long program. I speak at 5pm on 'Goodness and Incarnation'.To register please e-mail: f.ellis (at) heythrop.ac.uk. Attendance fee of £20 (£5 concessions) is payable and lunch and refreshments are included.

Roger Scrutonnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14210188.post-5457409523703549632008-11-17T17:11:00.003Z2008-11-17T17:18:27.219Z

The Sunday Times, 16th November 2008The medium is the message, Marshall McLuhan famously said. And by changing the message we change ourselves. Never has this observation been so relevant as it is today, when many people spend their days at the computer, conducting friendships through Facebook and MySpace, posting videos on their websites, going into real society shielded by an iPod, or simply

Roger Scrutonnoreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14210188.post-30194517005516473072008-11-12T17:47:00.000Z2008-11-17T17:49:11.855Z

Past Public Engagements, November 12th, 2008 at 6pm: lecture on 'The Defence of the West and how to respond to the Islamist challenge' at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington D.C. Venue: The Madison Hotel, 1177 15th Street NW. Washington, DC.October 31st, 2008 at 11 am: Newman Lecture organized by The Institute for the Psychological Sciences where I am also currently teaching. The

Roger Scrutonnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14210188.post-68417757835420850382008-11-02T20:52:00.003Z2008-11-02T20:56:48.618Z

Axess Magazine, 2008Faced with the spectacle of the cruelties perpetrated in the name of faith, Voltaire famously cried ‘Ecrasez l’infâme!’. Scores of enlightened thinkers followed him, declaring organised religion to be the enemy of mankind, the force that divides the believer from the infidel and which thereby both excites and authorises murder. Richard Dawkins is the most influential living

Roger Scrutonnoreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14210188.post-67679904493458231312008-09-29T20:45:00.003+01:002008-09-29T20:56:18.361+01:00

The Times, 26 September 2008Sometime in the early summer of 1961 the Whitechapel Gallery staged an exhibition of Mark Rothko, then quite recently famous, and well into what is known as his “signature style”: large, unframed canvases of vertical format, painted with symmetrical rectangular blocks of contrasting colours. Rothko had hit on this idiom some 14 years before, when he often used the

Roger Scrutonnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14210188.post-41277316046778015322008-08-06T21:10:00.004+01:002008-09-29T23:09:02.455+01:00

open Democracy, 5 August 2008Alexander Solzhenitsyn, like Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy, combined the gifts of a novelist with the stature and ambitions of a prophet. He may not have matched their achievements as a writer of imaginative prose, but he was their equal when it came to insight into evil and its collective manifestation. Moreover his literary monument - The Gulag Archipelago - was

Roger Scrutonnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14210188.post-77475279587932720532007-09-13T11:26:00.000+01:002007-09-14T11:29:31.308+01:00

New Statesman, 13th September 2007Our community, high on its ridge above the Vale of the White Horse, was luckier than many. The refugees from Gloucestershire told a sorry tale of waterlogged barns and spoiled crops, in the midst of which their abandoned houses stood like tombstones on their own ghostly reflections, solitary perches for the magpies and the crows. We were shivering from the worst

Roger Scrutonnoreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14210188.post-84338954765341588652007-08-28T11:04:00.000+01:002007-09-14T11:08:34.218+01:00

American Spectator, 28th August 2007A CENTURY AGO MARCEL DUCHAMP signed a urinal with the name "R. Mutt," entitled it "La Fontaine," and exhibited it as a work of art. One immediate result of Duchamp's joke was to precipitate an intellectual industry devoted to answering the question "What is art?" The literature of this industry is as empty as the neverending imitations of Duchamp's gesture.

Roger Scrutonnoreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14210188.post-72405809021109513042007-08-06T16:35:00.001+01:002008-09-29T23:11:38.283+01:00

Prospect Magazine, August 2007It is understandable that decent, sceptical people, observing the widespread revival in our time of superstitious cults, the emerging conflict between secular freedoms and religious edicts, and the murderous insanity of radical Islam, should be receptive to the anti-religious polemics of Dawkins, Dennett and Hitchens. The ‘sleep of reason’ has brought forth monsters,

Roger Scrutonnoreply@blogger.com29tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14210188.post-13837821442130138732007-07-23T12:40:00.001+01:002008-09-29T23:31:33.353+01:00

American Spectator, 23 July 2007REASON SHOWS ITSELF in all our attempts to understand the world and in all our ways of relating to each other. It is displayed in our choices, and also in our involuntary reactions. Only a rational being can weep or blush, even though weeping and blushing lie outside the reach of the will. And only a rational being can laugh. Hyenas make a noise like laughter, but

Roger Scrutonnoreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14210188.post-56491399713960126252007-07-13T12:53:00.000+01:002007-08-09T13:05:21.614+01:00

Sunday Times, 13 July 2007It is one of the most deeply rooted superstitions of our age that the purpose of education is to benefit those who receive it. What we teach in school, what subjects we encourage in universities and the methods of instruction are all subject to the one overarching test: what do the kids get out of it? And this test soon gives way to another, yet more pernicious in its

Roger Scrutonnoreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14210188.post-45955132591191162602007-06-27T10:10:00.001+01:002008-09-29T23:32:32.749+01:00

New Statesman, 15 March 2004From new kitchen to world takeover - wine makes anything seem possibleAncient philosophy, Christian religion and western art all see wine as a unique adjunct to the human condition: a channel of communication between god and man, between the rational soul and the animal, between the animal and vegetable kingdoms. Through wine, the distilled essence of the soil seems to

Roger Scrutonnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14210188.post-18158624607100333542007-06-07T13:37:00.000+01:002007-09-17T16:07:08.930+01:00

New Statesman, 7 June 2007Everyone knows about Chardonnay. At least, they think they doHow it has happened is a deep question of sociology; but it has happened, and there is no going back: everybody today has a clear and distinct idea of Chardonnay. Go to any competent restaurant in this brave new world, and there will be a selection of Chardonnays on the wine list. Enter a bar anywhere in

Roger Scrutonnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14210188.post-43913360563476135262007-05-28T11:42:00.000+01:002007-06-18T11:54:54.498+01:00

New Statesman, 28 May 2007Bourbon, a product of hardship, is today a refuge for the soulHuman ingenuity is never more manifest than in times of hardship, as is abundantly proved by food. All the most lasting culinary achievements are the products of dearth, in which people have had to impart flavour to some staple crop such as rice, millet, durum wheat or potatoes, with only a few scant

Roger Scrutonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14210188.post-35739729106638392662007-05-05T12:30:00.001+01:002008-09-29T23:41:46.028+01:00

Technology Review, 5 May 2007.Twas Ever ThusThe problems of biotechnology are in one respect like the problems of any technology. All discoveries, however beneficial, have unwanted side effects, and any technology can be used to good or bad ends. Hence there is no technological advance that is not greeted, at some stage, by protests. History does not record the protests that surrounded the

Roger Scrutonnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14210188.post-72778966267592151372007-04-30T11:45:00.000+01:002007-06-18T11:52:53.818+01:00

New Statesman, 30 April 2007.Ignore the health fanatics. Drinkers should follow four simple rules...The world is awash with advice about what not to drink. All kinds of virtuous products, in which honest labour and the love of life have been distilled for your benefit - unpasteurised milk, for example - have been forbidden by the health fanatics.Not a week passes without a newspaper article

Roger Scrutonnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14210188.post-82277711273153309832007-04-16T11:42:00.000+01:002007-06-18T11:54:27.966+01:00

New Statesman, 16 April 2007.If you're thinking of spending a fiver on wine, it's time to grow upHaving failed to keep Lent, I know it is hard to argue that I deserve to celebrate the season of resurrection. I certainly don't deserve to drink, free of charge, four 2003 clarets of the quality exhibited by those in Corney & Barrow's offer.However, I comfort myself with the thought that I am

Roger Scrutonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14210188.post-70445251641182334682007-02-13T11:41:00.000Z2007-06-18T11:55:21.510+01:00

American Spectator, 13 February 2007.When James Madison agitated to make religious freedom fundamental to the United States Constitution, it was not from hostility to religion. It was from hostility to established religion, with its presumption of an authority in worldly affairs that only an elected government should exercise. The first freedom listed in the Bill of Rights tells us that Congress

Roger Scrutonnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14210188.post-40357008624647368442007-01-28T20:04:00.000Z2007-06-13T13:19:28.476+01:00

The Sunday Telegraph, 28 January 2007Western societies have, in recent decades, undergone a radical change in their attitudes to homosexuality. What was once regarded as an intolerable vice is now regarded as an "orientation", no different in kind, though different in direction, from the inclinations that lead men to unite with women, and children to be born. This radical change began with the

Roger Scrutonnoreply@blogger.com26tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14210188.post-446660734159609282006-12-18T11:46:00.000Z2007-06-18T11:53:31.443+01:00

opendemocracy.net, 18 December 2006Nobody can doubt that Tony Blair has exhibited extraordinary skill during his time in office – maintaining a strong Parliamentary majority even after re-election, holding together a Party not known for its internal cohesion, facing down a constant challenge to his leadership from Gordon Brown, and all the while conducting an unpopular war and confronting the

Roger Scrutonnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14210188.post-1159322750709692112006-09-27T03:02:00.001+01:002008-09-29T23:42:58.442+01:00

Wall Street Journal, Tuesday, September 26, 2006Noam Chomsky's popularity owes little or nothing to the eminent place that he occupies in the world of ideas. That place was won many years ago in the science of linguistics, and no expert in the subject would, I think, dispute Prof. Chomsky's title to it.He swept away at a stroke the attempts of Ferdinand de Saussure and his followers to identify

Roger Scrutonnoreply@blogger.com28tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14210188.post-90449743779532042712006-09-01T11:57:00.000+01:002007-06-18T12:04:45.956+01:00

New Criterion, September 2006In 1968 the products of the postwar baby boom decided to seize the European future and to jettison the European past. In that same year Enoch Powell delivered to the Birmingham Conservatives the speech known forever after as “Rivers of Blood”: a speech that cost him his political career, and which, on one plausible interpretation, made the issue of immigration

Roger Scrutonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14210188.post-1155895804620171532006-08-17T23:01:00.001+01:002008-09-29T23:44:22.771+01:00

Comments Section, Wall Street Journal, 17 August 2006.The term ‘Islamofascism’ was introduced by the French writer Maxine Rodinson (1915-2004) to describe the Iranian Revolution of 1978. Rodinson was a Marxist, who described as ‘fascist’ any movement of which he disapproved. But we should be grateful to him for coining a word that enables people on the left to denounce our common enemy. After all

Roger Scrutonnoreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14210188.post-1153491408958850012006-07-21T15:06:00.001+01:002008-09-29T23:48:37.683+01:00

opendemocracy.net 20 July 2006The heart of the war in Lebanon is Hizbollah's challenge to Lebanon's national sovereignty, see my earlier piece for openDemocracy Lebanon before and after Syria (9/3/05) written after the assasination of Rafiq Hariri. This new piece is a response to openDemocracy articles on the war between Hizbollah and Israel: See: Alex Klaushofer, "Lebanon: unity within diversity

Roger Scrutonnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14210188.post-1152713999834147682006-07-12T15:13:00.002+01:002008-09-29T23:51:37.778+01:00

(work in progress, updated 10th August 2006).There is no doubt in my mind that we human beings are animals. Nor has this proposition been seriously doubted by any philosopher in the Western tradition, from Plato onwards. And because we are animals, we are governed by the laws of biology. Our life and death are biological processes, of a kind that we witness in other animals too. We have

Roger Scrutonnoreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14210188.post-1152713170444080132006-07-07T14:59:00.002+01:002008-09-30T02:33:59.447+01:00

opendemocracy.netUncomforatble truthsThe bombings of 7 July 2005 did not mark a new departure in Islamist tactics. Students of Indian history are well aware of the impact of Wahhabism on the Indian sub-continent in the 19th century, and of the nihilistic rage that seems so often to accompany Islamic revivals in places where Islam is a minority faith.The London bombings – in the wake of the 9/11

Roger Scrutonnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14210188.post-1152778266125424442006-06-23T08:58:00.000+01:002006-11-12T23:04:09.536Z

Talk to Vlaams Belang, Elzenveld Conference Center, Antwerp Friday 23rd June 2006When I was invited to give this talk by my old friend Paul Belien, my first reaction was one of pleasure that a political party in Belgium should be interested in my ideas. I have never been asked to address a political party in Western Europe, and I long ago concluded that a voice like mine is irrelevant to the

Roger Scrutonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14210188.post-43652847841475704002006-06-07T13:33:00.000+01:002007-06-18T12:01:38.172+01:00

Tempi, 7 June 2006.A little chapel on the Via Appia Antica reminds us of our fate. There it was, according to the legend, that St Peter, fleeing persecution by the Roman authorities, was arrested in his flight by the figure of Jesus, appearing as from nowhere. ‘Domine, quo vadis? he asked: ‘My Lord, where are you going?’ And Christ pointed the question back at him, so that Peter knew what he must

Roger Scrutonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14210188.post-1152711474262904072006-06-01T14:35:00.000+01:002006-11-12T23:14:01.716Z

opendemocracy.net 1 June 2006Francis Fukuyama has the gift of shining a cheerful American light on the mystical visions of the German romantics. He takes Hegel's apocalyptic idea of the end of history and, instead of standing it on its head as Marx did, strips off its funereal clothes and gives it a carnival suit of democratic values. In The End of History and the Last Man, Fukuyama takes his

Roger Scrutonnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14210188.post-48599476173626747722006-05-19T11:40:00.000+01:002007-06-18T11:55:55.441+01:00

Opinion Journal from the Wall Street Journal, 19 May 2006A utilitarian who became a liberal--but never understood the limits of reason.May 20 sees the 200th anniversary of the birth of John Stuart Mill, the greatest exponent of 19th-century liberalism, whose philosophy still dominates jurisprudence in the English-speaking world. Mill was a many-faceted intellectual who wrote on all aspects of

Roger Scrutonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14210188.post-1152778789980325942006-04-30T09:12:00.000+01:002007-06-18T11:50:44.379+01:00

Talk given at the University of Windsor, Canada, Thursday 30th April 2006What exactly is Western civilization, and what holds it together? Politicians, asked to define what we are fighting for in the “war on terror,” will always say freedom. But, taken by itself, freedom means the emancipation from constraints, including those constraints that might be needed if a civilization is to endure. If

Roger Scrutonnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14210188.post-1152788096973459422006-04-29T11:48:00.000+01:002006-11-15T01:57:38.113Z

The Spectator, 29th April 2006.Freud was born 150 years ago, on 6 May 1856, the same year as Wagner finished work on Die Walküre, the work which dramatises all the themes, from dreams to incest, that were to fascinate Freud. There is no doubt in my mind that it was Wagner, not Freud, who got things right, and that a knowledge of Wagner’s masterpiece casts serious doubts on Freud’s claims to

Roger Scrutonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14210188.post-1140711848025955832006-02-03T16:07:00.000Z2006-02-23T16:24:08.036Z

Defending Faith, The Daily Mail, 3 February 2006Last night the BBC broadcast the now notorious cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad as a suicide bomber. The previous day the owner of France Soir had taken the decision to sack the editor who had reprinted them. This decision to placate Muslim indignation coincided with our own government’s rag-bag bill outlawing religious hatred. And we might well

Roger Scrutonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14210188.post-1140710606664001622006-01-14T15:57:00.000Z2006-02-23T16:04:15.016Z

Dawkins is Wrong about God, The Spectator, 14 January 2006Faced with the spectacle of the cruelties perpetrated in the name of faith, Voltaire famously cried ‘Ecrasez l’infâme!’ Scores of enlightened thinkers have followed him, declaring organised religion to be the enemy of mankind, the force that divides the believer from the infidel and thereby both excites and authorises murder. Richard

Roger Scrutonnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14210188.post-40672734683894515192006-01-01T12:32:00.000Z2007-09-17T16:08:01.122+01:00

New Criterion, January 2006As its Greek name suggests, democracy is an ancient idea. But it is only a recent ideal. Greek writers either warned against democracy, or regarded it as simply one among many forms of political order, and not intrinsically preferable to its competitors. True, the Athenian democracy was a source of wonder and admiration—at least to Pericles and his faction. But it was a

Roger Scrutonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14210188.post-1140785224756032272005-11-11T12:17:00.000Z2006-02-24T13:21:38.756Z

Three lectures Love, Justice and Power in Wagner's Ring (delivered as visiting Humanities Council Fellow, Philosophy Department, University of Princeton)Lecture I: Wagner as a Metaphysical Composer (7 November 05) Lecture II: Ideas in The Ring and their Musical Realisation. (8 Nov05) Lecture III: Love, Justice and the Fate of the World (11 Nov05)In these lectures I shall outline an

Roger Scrutonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14210188.post-1140786686297597302005-11-09T13:03:00.000Z2006-02-24T13:20:27.810Z

Lecture and Debate: Eating Your Friends: a Carnivore's Credo.Respondent: Professor Peter Singer.(Center for Human Values - DeCamp Bioethics Seminars, Princeton University, 9 November 2005)The consensus among the monotheistic religions has been that animals exist for our purposes and that we are entitled to use them, domesticate them and eat them, subject only to God’s inscrutable dietary laws.

Roger Scrutonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14210188.post-1121862132487843532005-07-20T12:56:00.000+01:002005-07-20T13:22:12.493+01:00

The master of musicology: review in TLS of The Oxford History of Western Music by Richard Taruskin. volume two: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries and volume three: The Nineteenth Century. Oxford University Press (2005)Every now and then a quiet discipline in the humanities receives a shattering and world-changing shock, when one of its stars leaves its allotted orbit and crashes

Roger Scrutonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14210188.post-1120944925110787392005-07-09T22:26:00.000+01:002005-07-11T23:06:10.990+01:00

The London bombingApologists for terrorism (and they are not in short supply) argue that it is a weapon used by people who despair of achieving their goals in any other way. The terrorist is not an aggressor but a victim, and we must disarm him not by violence but by addressing the grievance that motivates his deeds. . . . .If you look at the actual condition of terrorists down the ages, however,

Roger Scrutonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14210188.post-1121860062733020882005-07-07T19:30:00.000+01:002005-07-20T12:47:42.743+01:00

The United States and the open society: a response to Gara LaMarcheIn his openDemocracy essay The crisis of democracy in America Gara LaMarche claims that the abuses of the political process by the right are so widespread and incorrigible as to amount to a breakdown of the open society. I don’t think LaMarche has given us proof either that this is so, or that the abuses, when they occur, are the

Roger Scrutonnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14210188.post-1121117417787756392005-06-25T22:23:00.000+01:002005-07-11T22:41:27.706+01:00

The power of negative thinkingJean-Paul Sartre, born 100 years ago on 21 June 1905, was the most striking presence in French post-war literature, and the originating cause of the left-bank culture of the Sixties. His prodigious literary gifts found expression in seminal works of philosophy, in novels, plays, stories, criticism, in a highly influential literary journal (Les Temps modernes) and in

Roger Scrutonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14210188.post-1140709041321398172005-06-25T14:50:00.000+01:002006-02-23T15:44:14.253Z

The Power of Negative Thinking, The Spectator, 25 June 2005Jean-Paul Sartre, born 100 years ago on 21st June 1905, was the most striking presence in French post-war literature, and the originating cause of the left-bank culture of the sixties. His prodigious literary gifts found expression in seminal works of philosophy, in novels, plays, stories, criticism, in a highly influential literary

Roger Scrutonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14210188.post-11604480664095926332005-06-20T11:24:00.000+01:002007-09-17T16:12:07.121+01:00

National Review Online, 20 June 2005Social reality is malleable. What it is depends on how it is perceived; and how it is perceived depends on how it is described. Hence language is an important instrument in modern politics, and many of the political conflicts of our time are conflicts over words. This truth was abundantly illustrated by the history of Communism and by the triumph of Communist

Roger Scrutonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14210188.post-1121117868925048232005-04-16T22:36:00.000+01:002005-07-11T22:37:48.926+01:00

Shameless and lovelessSexual intercourse began, according to Philip Larkin‚s famous poem, in 1963. Four decades have elapsed since then, and these decades have seen a growing recognition that sexual liberation is not the answer to the problems of sex but a new addition to them. Traditional sexual morality reinforced the society-wide commitment to marriage as the sole legitimate avenue to sexual

Roger Scrutonnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14210188.post-70395908080139133992005-04-15T11:19:00.000+01:002007-06-18T11:56:47.046+01:00

Times Online, 15 April 2005How to distinguish eroticism from pornographyFrancois Boucher could load any wall, ceiling, door-surround, or casement with as much human flesh as it could accommodate, while never producing an effect of grossness or obscenity. Female busts swim freely in his blue-green ethers, and female bottoms swing into view from his flowing fronds of drapery, their dimples caressed

Roger Scrutonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14210188.post-1153492426110164392005-03-09T15:29:00.000Z2006-07-21T15:33:46.116+01:00

Lebanon before and after Syria opendemocracy.net 9 March 2005Some people see the current protests of the Lebanese people against Syrian occupation as the first sign that the middle east is turning in the direction that the Americans intended – towards a widespread democratisation of the political process. If there is any truth in that observation it is this: that the American presence in Iraq

Roger Scrutonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14210188.post-1120588972008796202004-06-30T19:38:00.000+01:002005-07-13T23:14:27.046+01:00

What is the Precautionary Principle?This essay traces the origins of the Principle and its application. It explores whether it is effective in reducing risk.The Cult of Precaution was published in The National Interest, 30 June 2004; Summer 2004, pp. 148-154.PP.docThe theme of the Precautionary Principle was considered in The Risk of Freedom Briefing edited by Roger Scruton

Roger Scrutonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14210188.post-26363227932275844002000-09-09T13:12:00.000+01:002007-09-17T16:12:39.526+01:00

City Journal, September 2000It is now orthodox to regard social stigma as a form of oppression, to be discarded on our collective quest for inner freedom. But the political philosophers and novelists of former times would have been horrified by such a view. In almost all matters that touched upon the core requirements of social order, they believed that the genial pressure of manners, morals, and

Roger Scrutonnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14210188.post-1140709991546711202000-03-26T15:46:00.000+01:002006-02-23T15:53:11.546Z

The Consolations of Philosophy by Alain de Botton. Review in Mail on Sunday As a telephobe, I was bound to be sceptical of the book’s camera’s eye view of its subject. After a while, however, de Botton’s engaging style and modest perspective began to work their charm and I floated past Olympus in his company, enjoying the astonishment on those stern old faces as the daring young man in his flying

Roger Scrutonnoreply@blogger.com0