In this week’s Spectator USA Life ‘n’ Arts podcast, I’m casting the pod with Sir Roger Scruton, the knight of the living philosophers. Of course, Scruton is more than a philosopher. He has written widely and well on subjects as various as wine and Wagner, fox-hunting and free trade, and he has three new books out this month. The philosopher has Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition. The musician — there are two pianos at hand in Scruton’s study — has an essay collection, Music as an Art. And the fiction writer has his second collection of short stories, Souls in the Twilight.
One of the pleasures of talking with Scruton is his intellectual seamlessness, the natural and illuminating way in which he moves from one field of enquiry to another. His voice on the page has the same quality; no mean achievement in any kind of writer, let alone among philosophers, where complexity often leads to obscurity and opacity.
‘I belong much more to a Continental way of thinking,’ Scruton told me. ‘In particular, my first efforts at self-discovery occurred in France, where a true intellectual does not make a distinction between philosophy on the one hand, and literature on the other. There is a continuity between all these things, and I’m the same. I don’t see my philosophical and political ideas developing in some abstract, arcane arena, isolated from everyday life. On the contrary: I see them as reflections on the life that I’ve known and the life that I’ve lived, and the life that I’ve observed in others. And all of this is bound up with the language that I use.’
Our conversation flowed from what makes American conservatism different, and whether we can identify a conservative tradition because we are in its ‘twilight’; to immigration and the novel of ideas; and to why classical music ‘distinguishes our civilisation from all others’. As always with Scruton, it was an education.
