Madeleine Kearns: In the preface to your own book you explain, “freedom is not a set of axioms but an evolving consensus.” As far as possible, can you please explain the conservative approach to freedom?
Roger Scruton: Judged in absolute terms, my freedom threatens your freedom. There has to be an emerging civility, which prevents people from abusing their freedom in order to disrupt the consensus on which the general exercise of freedom depends. The rude, raw, “let it all hang out” freedom of the Californian hippies was in fact the most censorious and oppressive of societies that I have encountered. Just by being civil you exposed yourself to contempt as a bourgeois apologist.
Roger Scruton: Judged in absolute terms, my freedom threatens your freedom. There has to be an emerging civility, which prevents people from abusing their freedom in order to disrupt the consensus on which the general exercise of freedom depends. The rude, raw, “let it all hang out” freedom of the Californian hippies was in fact the most censorious and oppressive of societies that I have encountered. Just by being civil you exposed yourself to contempt as a bourgeois apologist.
MK: What are the main differences between classical liberalism and conservatism?
SRS: Conservatives believe in unchosen obligations (pieties), whereas classical liberals think that the only source of obligation is choice.
MK: And yet they are, you observe, on the same side in today’s culture war. Why is that?
SRS: Because there are so many people who wish to control us, and in doing so to wipe away the image of the past.
SRS: Because there are so many people who wish to control us, and in doing so to wipe away the image of the past.
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