All political philosophy boils down to two basic ideas about human nature – the utopian vision and the tragic vision. Either man is a perfectible animal and we can build a society free of inequality, injustice, poverty and discrimination, or these grand dreams will always fail because of man’s failings. The first idea inspired the Jacobins and Bolsheviks; the latter has informed the views of conservatives from Edmund Burke to Roger Scruton.
Arguably the greatest political philosopher of his era, Scruton’s misfortune is to have lived during a time when, despite the evident failures of Communism, the masses have embraced the utopian vision like never before. As a youth he witnessed the 1968 student revolution in Paris which, although superficially a failure, has been so fantastically successful in imparting utopian ideas throughout the political-media class that deviation from its principles is socially unacceptable and in some cases a “hate crime”. For, as Professor Scruton points out, secular ideologies can be just as intolerant of heretics as any religion; indeed, the religious, believing in salvation in the next life, are less prone to believing in utopian ideas about this one.
