The pursuit of genius in architecture is what has most contributed to the unstitching of our urban fabric, giving us those buildings in outlandish shapes and unsightly materials that take a chunk of the city and make it into somewhere else. For the truly great projects, architects are necessary, and can take credit for magnificent [...]
We must surely understand composer-conductor Pierre Boulez as the instigator of a false conception of music—not only of the place of music in high culture, and in the civilisation that is our greatest spiritual possession, but of the nature of music itself. DE MORTUIS NIL NISI BONUM: Of the dead, nothing unless good. But you [...]
Perhaps we should be grateful to John Williams and Howard Shore for showing us that we can still use the tonal language to create music that resonates in the hearts of ordinary people. Perhaps we should be suspicious of those musical censors who leap to dismiss whatever is spontaneously likeable as cliché, and whatever touches [...]
Richard Wagner’s story of gods and heroes, of giants and dwarfs, is not a fairy tale. It is addressed to modern people, who have lost the ways of enchantment, and for whom the path to heroism is overgrown. It is a story in which law and love, power and property are all caught up in [...]
We live in a world which has in many ways been uglified, and it’s a world that we want to redeem so that we are part of it once again. Beauty is, then, the search for home, for a place where you can be at home with yourself and with others, but in particular where [...]
The late, great conservative philosopher, Sir Roger Scruton, delivers the keynote address at the Institute of Public Affairs' 2014 Foundations of Western Civilization Symposium. He discusses the topics of freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the pursuit of truth. —Editor This essay was first published here in August 2014. The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of [...]
Wilhelm Röpke asked how to address the problems of social fragmentation and the loss of community feeling, in a world where the market is left to itself. Röpke’s own idea was that society is nurtured and perpetuated at the local level, through motives that are quite distinct from the pursuit of rational self interest. Two [...]
People don’t like hierarchies and privileges, and there is a natural disposition to say that they’re not deserved. When anybody claims some kind of hierarchical position, the question is raised, “Who is he? Who does he think he is? And by what right does he claim this superiority over me?” There is a very famous [...]
By and large the educated elites in the Western world today are without religious belief and often animated by what I call a “culture of repudiation,” keen to banish old ideas of the sacred from public life and to remake the institutions and structures of civil society so as to reflect their own liberated lifestyle. [...]
Wherever we are—in restaurants or in the Metro or wherever—we are overhearing music coming at us from all angles, and we are learning how to ignore it. We live in a society where, if we do not learn to ignore it, we cannot also learn to listen to it. This puts an enormous strain on [...]
"The sacred and the beautiful stand side by side. Two doors that open onto a single space. In that space we find our home."—Sir Roger Scruton (1944-2020). Please watch this brilliant, classic documentary by the late Sir Roger Scruton on "Why Beauty Matters." —The editors This essay was first published here in December 2011. [...]
The cause of the environment is not, in itself, a left-wing cause at all. It is not about “liberating” or empowering the victim, but about safeguarding resources. It is not about “progress” or “equality” but about conservation and equilibrium. Its following may be young and dishevelled; but that is largely because people in suits have [...]