The Left escape unscathed

Shirley Robin Letwin

THINKERS OF THE NEW LEFT by Roger Scruton Longman, £9.95

Professor Scruton's book is an un- ashamed attack on 'the Left'. Since he regards the Left as a 'self-declared enemy', he refuses to apologise for having violated 'accepted standards of literary politeness'. But despite his open hostility, the precise target of Scruton's attack remains a mys- tery. It is not because his 14 subjects include writers as disparate as Althusser, Galbraith, Sartre, Foucault, and E. P. Thompson. As they have all taken issue with traditional moral and political ideas from a recognisably 'Leftist' standpoint, they are plausible enemies for Scruton. The uncertainty about what Scruton wants to demolish arises from his own stand- point.

Even his attitude to Marx and Marxism is unclear. He regularly condemns his subjects for being 'Marxist' and much of what he writes implies that there is a necessary connection between Marx's doc- trine and communist tyrannies. But on the other hand, Scruton also says a good deal in favour of Marx. 'The totalitarian struc- ture of communist government' he writes, 'is not an inevitable consequence of Marxist conceptions.' He calls Marx himself a genius and praises him for having recog- nised that history 'certainly does contain collective agents', taking trouble to empha- sise that this insight of Marx's is a fun- damental axiom of the Conservative creed. And when Scruton accuses Marxists of mistakenly treating classes as collective agents, and refusing to recognise — as Scruton believes one should — that 'national consciousness' is 'a genuine agent in history', he points out that Marxists have ignored 'Marx's warnings to the contrary'. Yet Marx never stopped talking about the class war and Scruton himself endorses Marx's diagnosis of a class war in England for a certain period. Nor, for that matter, does Scruton explain why a sentiment or motive like 'national consciousness' should be treated as an 'agent' whereas a coffee- five noun like 'class' may not.

Apart from Marxism, Scruton's most persistent charge against Leftists is that they yearn for 'a powerless world' and fail to recognise that 'the condition of society is essentially a condition of domination.' But there is no knowing what Scruton means by 'domination' or 'power'. In one place, he equates 'a condition of domination' with people being 'bound to each other by emotions and loyalties and distinguished by rivalries and powers'. Elsewhere he says that, 'Real human freedom is constrained by human circumstances, and therefore cannot be free from "the worm of domina- tion" '. Then in other passages Scruton argues more conventionally that social order requires forcing some to obey others: 'Every advanced society contains points of control . . . which gives those who occupY them effective control over decisions.'

As if that confusion were not enough, all talk of power becomes irrelevant when Scruton insists that 'the system' which governs our lives is 'surely the expression of no human design'. It 'arises,' he says, `by an "invisible hand" according to pro- cesses which we do not control even when we believe that we do so.' Since he denies that human beings can do anything to shape the order in which they live, he denounces Leftists who 'blame the system'. And he also condemns 'philosophers of social contract' who suppose 'that we could understand the outcome of social interac- tion before we had engaged in it'. This means that a free society which rests on voluntary arrangements, made reliable by enforcing legal rules, is impossible.

Although Scruton speaks as well of 'the countless negotiations' composing 'the body politic' and contrasts socialism to 'a consensual order', he divorces 'a consen- sual order' from human choice when he denies that even 'actual socialism' is 'im- posed' and explains that:

The ruling party did not envisage the result and then seek by all means to establish it . . . . The coercive order is no more chosen by the party than the consensual order is chosen by the citizens in 2 free society.

It follows that Leftists should not be blamed for their sins and that Marx's view Of history is the correct one.

Scruton's disagreement with the Left dwindles to a few current issues when he discusses Ronald Dworkin, professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford. Scruton speaks of Dworkin's 'well-earned intellectual reputa- tion' and praises him for his 'powerful theory of judicial process', which is an `appealing picture' and 'typically Con- servative'. Even when he condemns Dwor- kin for advocating civil disobedience, posi- tive discrimination, and sexual liberty, Scruton puts him well above the 'Parisian gauchiste':

He is distinguished by his recognition that institutions are, in the end, necessary to his purpose, and that ideology is no substitute for the patient work of law.

All this is curious because Dworkin's legal theory, far from being independent of the policies he advocates, is designed to Show that justice requires policies like Positive discrimination. This is part of Dworkin's message that the traditional Idea of law as a system of rules, where adjudication is distinct from legislation, Should be abandoned. But it is not surpris- ing that Scruton should admire Dworkin's legal theory. For Scruton's view of political order as the product of an 'invisible hand' 9r 'process' excludes what the traditional Idea of law postulates, that legal rules are Made and changed by human beings and that the order secured by such rules is what distinguishes a political association from a tribe.

Although in other passages Scruton takes the opposite view of political order that an 'impersonal system' is a very bad thing and that 'personal government' is What's wanted, that view is also incompati- ble with the rule of law. He rests his case for 'personal government' on the bizarre contention that 'the theoretical base and practical effect' of 'right wing politics' is 'the idea of corporate personality' and attributes this idea to Gierke, Maitland, Roman, German, and English law. But the impressive lineage does not help his argu- ment which runs as follows: by the 'device of corporate liability, the "capitalist" world has ensured that wherever there is agency, there is also liability'. 'Personal government' is essential to 'responsible government'. Therefore corporate liability ensures 'responsible government'.

The more usual view is that corporate liability permits individual members of an enterprise to limit their personal liability. Still, one might argue reasonably, if not accurately, that in Britain the government is regarded as a corporation and since in British law corporations are responsible for their actions, so is the government. But the notion that the Crown or the government, being a corporation, is thereby 'personi- fied' so as to make government 'personal' can only be arrived at by a fallacious equation of a legal person, that is to say a corporation, with 'personal government'. In fact, Maitland says that the view of the government as a 'corporation' rests on the 'parsonification' of the King or Crown, that is, by likening monarchs to parsons who were regarded as 'corporations sole'. Though it is of course desirable to allot responsibility to clearly identified officers of the government, it does not follow that the law should be 'personal'. The law protects its subjects from arbitrary power through its impersonal rules which disting- uish an exercise of authority, which the subject is obliged to accept, from an arbitrary exercise of power determined by a personal preference. But the distinction between authority and power does not interest Scruton. Instead he says that 'most of us are not coerced by the law, provided the law enacts the procedures and princi- ples of natural justice', which implies that we should willingly observe the law only when we approve of it.

About his heroes, Scruton is no clearer than about his enemies. He cites both Hayek and Matthew Arnold as outstanding exponents of Conservatism. Yet Hayek defends precisely the sort of 'liberalism' that Arnold opposed. Arnold argued that the state is 'the power most representative of the right reason of the nation', and therefore should direct a unified system of education like the French one. Hayek would hardly agree. Nor would another of Scruton's Conservative heroes, Michael Oakeshott.

Scruton praises Oakeshott (along with Burke and Hegel) for his criticism of 'instrumental reason' which has 'shown the connection', Scruton says, 'between in- strumental rationality and the loss of re- spect toward established things.' By in- strumental rationality or reason, Scruton appears to mean considering how best to bring about a desired result. Oakeshott and others call it 'practical reasoning'. Scruton seems to be referring to Oakeshott's criticism of 'rationalism'. But that was not an attack on instrumental or practical reasoning. Indeed no sane man could renounce practical reasoning, as Oakeshott makes it clear. What Oakeshott opposes in rationalism is the belief that practical reasoning has to be deduced from some abstract doctrine. And when he describes moral considerations and civil association as 'non-instrumental', he is not saying, as Scruton believes, that 'our alle- giance to the State is no more provisional than our allegiance to the family.' Oakeshott is distinguishing between diffe- rent kinds of considerations and forms of association, without condemning any; moreover, he emphasises that non- instrumental civil association is an abstrac- tion.

Conservatives as a whole fare no better in Scruton's hands. He describes them as committed to 'custom, compromise, and settled indecision'; they have, he says, an 'allegiance to what is established' which is 'neither conditional nor purposive'; they believe that political association should be 'neither communicative nor purposive, but merely relaxed'. In short, they are a bunch of inert, flabby, blundering, dumb, irra- tional idlers. That picture of Conservatives should gladden the hearts of their oppo- nents.

With critics like Scruton, the Left need not look for friends.