Holding Fast to Good Things

Roger Scruton’s essays remind us what it means to be conservative at heart.

Against the Tide: The Best of Roger Scruton’s Columns, Commentaries, and Criticism By Roger Scruton (Bloomsbury Continuum, 256 pages, $28) Nearly everything in this collection originally appeared in a newspaper or a magazine, among these the one you are holding in your hands. From 2006 to 2012, the philosopher Sir Roger Scruton contributed a monthly column to The American Spectator. These essays represented a fraction of his total journalistic output, and even the prodigious volume of Scruton’s occasional writings seems unimpressive set beside the extraordinary number of books he wrote — by my count, fifty-six. Of these, everyone will have his favorite. While I very much admire Scruton’s work on Wagner, especially the volume on Parsifal (with which it is easy to imagine the present pope finding himself very much in sympathy), I think the book most likely to find a wide and appreciative readership in the years to come is the monograph on beauty from 2010, of which I cherish my first edition (with an error on the back of the dust jacket dating the cover painting by Botticelli to circa 1840). On Beauty would later be reprinted in Oxford University Press’s “Very Short Introduction” series, to which Scruton also contributed perhaps the only lucid thing on Kant ever written by a native English speaker. My copy of the latter, picked up some years ago from a second-hand bookstore in Washington, D.C., was the most thoroughly annotated volume I have ever owned, with entire pages colored in blue highlighter by some no doubt grateful undergraduate. Subscribers, click here to read the full magazine. Not a subscriber? Click here to become a Patriot member today and receive access to The American Spectator in print and online! In addition to being rather more prolific than most philosophers, Scruton lived a somewhat more eventful life. Thousands of anti-communists inveighed against the Soviet menace from the pages of journals and well-remunerated think tank positions; Scruton, who...