@Joan-Enric Torrent. Barcelona.
E. Burke and B. Disraeli predicated their ‘Conservatism’ on a shared faith in the benevolence of a landed English aristocracy. Call it what it was a comforting political delusion . The fact of Dickensian London coming to vivid literary life proves that ‘faith’ to be utterly misplaced!Or was it a product of Dickensian political sniping at that ‘benevolent aristocracy’ ?
The genius of Disraeli was that he used his novels as a way of speculative political thinking , no such politician, even resembling him exists today. I read ‘Vivian Grey’ until it lapsed into a pastiche of the Gothic. Then I found the revelatory study Benjamin Disraeli: The Novel as Political Discourse by Michael Flavin:
https://books.google.com/books/about/Benjamin_Disraeli.html?id=urNlAAAAMAAJ
On Roger Scruton, I read his Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey until page 291 and then I gave up.
It reminded so much of the hectoring, or more candidly, hostile rhetoric adopted by Paul Johnson in his Modern Times: A History of the World from the 1920s to the 1980s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Times:_A_History_of_the_World_from_the_1920s_to_the_1980s
Johnson’s savage, indeed unrelenting, attack on Dag Hammarskjöld is representative of Johnson’s animus toward his ‘Markings’ ? Or was it the U.N.’s non-denominational chapel featuring the paintings of Mark Rothko’s, that raised Johnson’s ire?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Times:_A_History_of_the_World_from_the_1920s_to_the_1980s
Mr. Garton Ash, from his aerie at the ultra -reactionary Hoover Institution ( He and Fukuyama must have some compelling chats in the Versailles lunch room, or is it the catering truck in the parking lot?)
Your gush at the end of your comment:
Mr. Gaston Ash linking of Burke, Scruton and the EU, has been a conceptual surprise full of hope.
One could describe, out of many choices, the Mendacity of The Elites: Monnet’s Neo-Liberalism before the fact: the EU cartel masquerading as Federalist. And Scruton as an Enlightener. This admixture of the patently obvious offers hope?
StephenKMackSD
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