Loyalties.

Scruton’s immediate problem, one that Americans face as well, is that much of England’s cultural, social, religious, and political history has been ignored or dismissed as irredeemably imperialist, racist, sexist, and intolerant. These politically incorrect sins, bred in the bone of the nation, could not be washed away, it was believed, but could be covered over by a new public teaching of egalitarianism, multiculturalism, and social justice. Such reeducation, Scruton says in England: An Elegy (2000) was already becoming evident in his own boyhood schooling in the late 1950s. He innately rebelled against it, desiring “to be reconciled with the thing that everyone denounced, which some called England, some Britain, some the ruling classes and most just ‘them.’” Such reconciliation is, he thinks, a way of reintroducing neighbors and fellow citizens to the shared “language, customs, territory, and common interest in defense . . . which enable people to call on the sacrifices that make communities durable.” Why do we have a culture of the rule of law? Look to the loyalties of place, home, and membership, and the expectations of respect that these forge, and there lie the origins of the legitimacy of law. When people know to whom they belong and to whom they are accountable, the social and political aspects of our personhood find their legitimate space for trust and devotion to a public thing.

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