Embracing Scruton's Cultural Conservatism
Christopher Stevens, University of Maryland and University of Helsinki
stevens1{at}umd.edu, chris.stevens{at}helsinki.fi
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Abstract |
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Despite commitments to claims about the welfare-enhancing superiority of art-interested ways of life implicit in much of their work, aestheticians have shown little interest in explicitly bringing their discipline to bear on issues at the intersection of ethics, aesthetics, and politics. Roger Scruton's work on culture bucks that trend, but few have contributed to the discussion he initiated. After an extended treatment of one of many possible examples showing that aesthetics-related matters can and do bear significantly on social and political issues, I present key components of Scruton's brand of cultural conservatism and explore one way of working out some of the details, in an attempt to show how the possibility that the kinds of off-putting unwieldiness and putative sociopolitical dubiousness from which ambivalence toward issues at the intersection stems might be satisfactorily dealt with.