Mao Zedong explained to his followers that “all culture, all literature, and art belong to definite classes and are geared to definite political lines. … They are, as Lenin said, cogs and wheels in the whole revolutionary machine.” He spoke late at night in 1942 in China’s Shanxi province where his eventually victorious forces sought refuge from Japanese invaders and, at times, the Nationalists of Chiang Kai-shek. His warriors, while inspired by him and resentful of the Japanese and the Nationalists, were not yet the new men he required. So Mao began his lectures. Art, he told them, needed to be “a powerful weapon for uniting and educating the people and for crushing and destroying the enemy.” It should be a “solid, serious movement to correct unorthodox tendencies.”

The position that art must serve a political purpose was not unique to Mao, or even communist authors (as Ayn Rand’s oeuvre certainly shows). Whether fascist, communist, liberal, or other, many political movements deliberately cultivated artists and deployed the arts as a vector for what later was called social engineering. If such art is meant to persuade, the observer still has freedom. If art is meant to overcome that freedom, is it still art? Art requires a certain anthropological vision, grounded in the free person who lives in but is not determined by community. Ironically, given how governments have often deployed art, politics presupposes such freedom as well.

Unsurprisingly such a connection between art and politics as works of man operating outside of the bounds of necessity is rooted in Aristotle. The opening chapter of Ferenc Hörcher’s fascinating study of Art and Politics in Roger Scruton’s Conservative Philosophy provides an excellent analysis of Aristotle and Plato on the arts and politics as a grounding for an elaboration of the thought of, perhaps, the most important conservative public intellectual of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. As a conservative, Scruton was horrified by tendencies in modernity to engineer a new society, one which sought to pervert the humans it claimed to help. As Hörcher notes, Scruton’s concern in this regard emerged from his love of beauty—his sense that there were things in this world worth conserving—that led him towards an increased engagement in public discourse on politics, conservation, and, eventually, religion.

Art and Politics in Roger Scruton’s Conservative Philosophy never moves the spotlight from Scruton’s texts. Though Hörcher knew and interacted with Scruton for decades, he includes no anecdotes of the latter nor does he ever attempt to get inside the latter’s head. He also offers no criticism of Scruton, preferring to lay out Scruton’s intellectual influences and review many of his works. He does so in a manner that examines each work philosophically, that is, treating analysis of art and politics not from the perspective of an artist, art historian, political theorist, or statesman. Although Scruton wrote music and novels, engaged in politics in his journalism, and participated in the “Building Better, Building Beautiful” Commission, Hörcher’s contention is that Scruton himself approached these domains as a philosopher.

Though Scruton was clearly a philosopher, he is best known as a public intellectual whose writing in columns and popular books and speaking in televised events sparred with and poked at leftist and Marxist ideas, thinkers, and public intellectuals. He wrote How to Be a Conservative and warned of Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left. He wrote an Elegy for England, Confessions of a Heretic, and one collection of his criticism is appropriately titled Against the Tide. Scruton was read and discussed because, through wit and word, he was either a heroic avatar or a worthy adversary. His political positions increasingly drew him away from university life and the favor of his academic colleagues. Even political opponents, however, recognized his independence of mind (his conservatism did not offer unqualified support for Thatcherism, quite the contrary) and his courage (while often hating his commentary in the Salisbury Review, his efforts to support intellectuals and others inside Czechoslovakia earned him a certain amount of respect, even in unfriendly quarters).

Nevertheless, his writing began with his highly regarded, including among political opponents, work on aesthetics—work that was the result of philosophic inquiry. Hörcher’s book, then, deals with Scruton as a philosopher and seeks to “shed a new light on Scruton’s achievements by connecting the two fields of philosophy in which he was engaged most,” those of art and politics. In art, Scruton insisted on the importance of beauty—that art, while never wholly objective or subjective, must have some aspect that goes beyond the political and that beauty, in itself, is to be treasured. In politics, he “remained more or less Burkean … defending the virtues of the British political tradition, with its cherished ideas of the King-in-Parliament, the unwritten constitution, habeas corpus and Bill of Rights.” That is, despite the fairly strong strategic overlap of post-World War II conservatives and liberals in the Western world, Scruton was decidedly conservative and not a classical liberal. Hörcher also follows the movement in Scruton’s writings in these areas towards a sense of “human nature which is of metaphysical relevance” which, whatever Scruton’s creedal and practical religiosity, led him to appreciate religion and refer to a transcendental “beyond” which was necessary to inform both politics and art.

Art and Politics begins with a brief discussion of Michael Oakeshott in order to distinguish Scruton from another famous British philosopher identified with conservatives. Oakeshott and Scruton often appeared similar in politics and disposition, sharing a preference for moderating change and prudential guidance in politics. Oakeshott’s historicism, however, led him in directions that could be seen as relativist, weakening the substantive case for conserving something (since it was a historical product). Scruton assumed that there were permanent things that informed history, rather than were determined by it. This distinction is fundamental for Hörcher’s account which emphasizes Scruton as a conservative (not liberal) and the classical roots of his understanding of art and politics.

Hörcher then moves through a brilliant yet concise analysis of Aristotle’s categories of knowledge before coming to Socrates’ rendition of Diotima’s speech from Plato’s Symposium. There, Diotima refers to the “begetting of … beautiful things by means of both the body and the soul” before speaking of both poets and statesmen. “This suggests that poets and statesman are aiming at the same things: to have the Good for themselves. To achieve this, they ‘create in the soul’” and statesmen, like Lycurgus and Solon, are given the “greatest shrines” in recognition because “they have begotten many children and good things through their laws.” Art and politics, therefore, involve the creation of that which leads to the good and poetic and mythic “stories about [how] the origins of the community … had an exceptional civic urgency” in ancient Athens.

Scruton saw art, in its many forms (theatre, poetry, architecture, literature) as being fundamental for the polis and nation. He found modern art horrendous. Modern cities were indistinguishable aggregations of characterless shapes of concrete and steel whose presence on streets needed to be explained by maps. In the town or the “old city,” each building had a face, a character. One did not need to focus on a phone screen to learn where one was, or why this place was important (or how many stars or likes others gave it). The pedestrian was walking somewhere. And the town, in many ways, consistently held wisdom to offer as remedies to the social and political ills of modern urban areas.

Modern urban elites did not “dwell” (in a Heideggerian sense) anywhere, but in the nowhere constituted by the same forgettable malls and franchises to be found anywhere. Nowhere was an artifice, a deliberate product of the modern disregard for art’s responsibilities and functions. Modern architecture, for Scruton, de-faced buildings by rendering the façade of buildings anonymous or, simply devoid of beauty. “The modernist attack on the façade deprives buildings of their faces. It turns the street into a meaningless space. … If our environment loses its character of beauty, it cannot fulfill its basic function, which is to lead us to the recognition that we are not alone in this world, that our being here is a ‘gift, and receiving it is a task.’” As with other modern art, it was a form of desecration, a critical concept, and concern for Scruton. Desecrate—to render the sacred ordinary—is powerful as both an intentional assault on a cherished tradition and, particularly in his later work, there is a sense of something genuinely beyond the here and now, the Divine, that is being profaned. 

For Scruton, art and beauty are fundamental in preserving a sense of the sacred, an orientation for human endeavors. Art need not serve a purpose but neither is it simply for its own sake. Beauty allows art to have profound effects on people and society. Hörcher draws out a critical insight of Scruton’s on beauty, noting that it

operates in a similar way to manners, “as a coordinating device, whereby individuals can adjust to each other and live on terms.” This is a crucial claim, because it suggests that beauty is not simply to be understood as a subjective choice of taste, or a wholly autonomous kind of value, entirely independent of the communal coexistence of human beings.

To defend this claim Scruton compares Greek tragedy and the Roman games in the Colosseum, both forms of popular entertainment. “The latter practice was morally deplorable, and becoming an expert in judgments concerning that practice did not help one to acquire good taste. On the other hand, through watching Greek tragedy Athenian citizens learnt how to get integrated into their society.” One can certainly debate whether the Marvel multiverse movies or recent art installations at major museums consistently conduce one towards good or bad taste, but Scruton’s examples make the point clear.

In addition to beauty having some genuine, non-relativizable aspect, Hörcher notes Scruton’s analysis of Leon Battista Alberti’s notion of beauty as appropriateness, as fitting. Such a vision is particularly meaningful for a conservative explanation of beauty as a ”coordinating device” and as revelatory of and pedagogical in building appreciation among persons for those around them. Here beauty develops and “achieve[s] an external view of ourselves,” to see beyond the self, serving as a foundation for “the institutional framework of society, including law and morals.” An outfit may strike one as beautiful in a particular context but may not be fitting in another and thus no longer beautiful. Similarly, an appropriate gesture of sacrifice is beautiful when it is fitting. Beauty is important for dwelling together and, thus, spoiling beauty is not simply a wound against the transcendent but an injury to the community.

Scruton’s comments as a public intellectual were built on ideas that beauty had communal and anthropological value. Dwelling in a place meant a sort of time-endowed participation in the common life which informed and was informed by beauty. This combined his interests in ancient and modern philosophy, insights on music and architecture, love for England, and concerns about anonymizing tendencies in politics (of the totalitarian and liberal kinds). It also led to giving more attention to roles played by religion, often following Girard’s writings on scapegoats and Durkheim’s studies of society and anomie.

The path to religion was not necessarily obvious in his early writings but Hörcher makes a good case that interests in politics and art in Scruton’s early writings, which eventually informed each other, both pushed his thoughts toward an appreciation of religion. Indeed,

the core of this book … [is] the connection Scruton supposes between politics and art, the distinguishing mark of Scruton’s version of conservatism. For the late Scruton, the fact that culture is rooted in religion is crucial, even in a secular age. Although he himself had his limits in his religiosity, the religious dimension remains meaningful for Scruton’s account of the relationship between politics and art.

Arriving at a recognition of the role of religion was, perhaps, not inevitable, but it followed a position that was consistently and deliberately conservative and not liberal.

Given Scruton’s public political conservatism, it might surprise some that he had so limited a role in political affairs, particularly in Margaret Thatcher’s government (1979–90). But Scruton was very critical of British liberals. Hörcher deftly explains the difference in positions in a discussion of property rights, important to both groups but defended differently. “The liberal view is based on the assumption of the individual as an autonomous, rational and morally responsible agent, while for the conservative property helps the smooth operation of human cohabitation.” The human community precedes the agent as “private property is something that requires others in order to be accepted. In this respect liberalism presupposes conservatism: individual rights presuppose the existence of communal ones, that is, commonly shared norms.”

Based on the above, “the major problem with the liberal idea of freedom is that it is ready to destroy the institutions upon which that very freedom depended. It also fails to take into account the notion of political authority.” The role of institutions and authority is evident in his defense of British tradition, his particular interest in rule of law, and his critique of supranational bodies. “His argument [against universal human rights] is that individuals can only enjoy rights in regimes which have the means to enforce those rights against its critics. The very notion of universal human rights threatens to tear the notion of rights away from the legal machinery which secured their enforcement.” This explains Scruton’s apologies for fox-hunting, his move to the countryside, his elegy for England, as well as his support for leaving the European Union. Liberal insistence on the rationality of the individual was not enough, Scruton thought, as the customs, institutions, and laws which provided order for a person were critical for living well. Rather than expressing an individual preference to be in Philadelphia, Scruton opined his epitaph “should be on a gravestone in the grounds of All Saints in Garsdon, and it should say: ‘The Last Englishman: Organist at this Church.’”

There are not many books that examine the philosophical commentary of organists in local churches in England, but this is an important one! Hörcher’s book is great for students of Scruton as well as those who are interested in philosophical, as opposed to more partisan or technical, treatment of art and politics. The book follows up on two recent Hörcher publications: A Political Philosophy of Conservatism: Prudence, Moderation and Tradition and The Political Philosophy of the European City: From Polis, through City-State, to Megalopolis? With this third publication, and previous studies of the historical and political culture of Hungarian constitutionalism, Hörcher has put together an oeuvre of historically, empirically grounded philosophical inquiry into the practical experience of lived political engagement that extends beyond the formal political sphere. Read together, the works demonstrate a Scrutonian vision.