How to Be a Conservative by Roger Scruton

 

Roger Scruton’s How to Be a Conservative is not a polite book. It is not an apologetic bow before fashionable ideologies or a meandering lament about the decline of the West. It is a battle standard. A declaration. A torch shoved defiantly into the darkness of our age of relativism, victimhood, and cultural vandalism. Scruton does what few dare: he makes the moral case for conservatism, not as mere reaction or nostalgia, but as a worldview rooted in truth, duty, and love. Love, above all, for the things we inherit, for the ties that bind us, for the fragile institutions that stand between civilisation and barbarism. For Scruton, conservatism is not selfishness; it is stewardship. It is the recognition that we are custodians of a home, our nation, our culture, our civilisation, that we did not build alone and have no right to destroy. And yet, this book is polemical precisely because it refuses the shallow caricatures. Conservatism, Scruton shows, is not the ideology of plutocrats or aristocrats, it is the politics of belonging. It is about the family that raises you, the school that educates you, the town that shelters you, the faith that consoles you. Progressivism, by contrast, rips up roots in the name of liberation and leaves the individual naked, isolated, and manipulable. Socialism promises equality but delivers envy. Liberalism promises freedom but corrodes obligation. Multiculturalism promises tolerance but dissolves cohesion. Scruton exposes these as the half-truths of intellectual cowards, ideologies that promise heaven and deliver wastelands. What makes How to Be a Conservative more than just another manifesto is Scruton’s style, lucid, humane, but sharpened with English irony. He never rants; he dissects. He lets progressives hang themselves with their own contradictions. He reveals, again and again, that what they deride as “prejudice” is often nothing more than common sense, an instinct for what works, what lasts, what deserves loyalty. To read Scruton is to feel something like shame. Shame at how willingly we have sold our inheritance for the cheap thrills of ideology. Shame that we have mocked tradition as a prison rather than recognising it as a treasure chest. And yet, in his gentle but unflinching way, Scruton also awakens gratitude, that we are still heirs to a civilisation worth defending. This is not a perfect book, and Scruton admits it. He is too honest for triumphalism. Conservatism is not easy, he warns. It requires restraint, responsibility, and sacrifice, things modern society sneers at. But that is precisely why this book matters. In an age where the loudest ideologues chant about “change” with no thought of consequence, Scruton quietly insists: we must conserve what is good before we can improve what is broken. If you want to know why conservatism is not just necessary but noble, read this book. If you want to know why the smug pieties of the Left collapse under scrutiny, read this book. And if you want to be reminded that civilisation is not an accident but an achievement, read this book. Scruton leaves us with a hard truth: being a conservative in the 21st century is not comfortable. It is resistance. It is heresy against the cult of progress. But it is also, perhaps the last, form of sanity.