Roger Scruton Quote
Decisions are free when each of us settles his path through life by negotiation, playing his cards according to his own best judgement and without coercion from others. Traditional liberalism is the view that such a society is possible only if the individual members have sovereignty over their own lives – which means being free both to grant and to withhold consent respecting whatever relations may be proposed to them. Individual sovereignty exists only where the state guarantees rights, such as the right to life, limb and property, so protecting citizens from invasion and coercion by others, including invasion and coercion by the state.
Decisions are free when each of us settles his path through life by negotiation, playing his cards according to his own best judgement and without coercion from others. Traditional liberalism is the view that such a society is possible only if the individual members have sovereignty over their own lives – which means being free both to grant and to withhold consent respecting whatever relations may be proposed to them. Individual sovereignty exists only where the state guarantees rights, such as the right to life, limb and property, so protecting citizens from invasion and coercion by others, including invasion and coercion by the state.
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About Roger Scruton
His publications include The Meaning of Conservatism (1980), Sexual Desire (1986), The Aesthetics of Music (1997), and How to Be a Conservative (2014). He was a regular contributor to the popular media, including The Times, The Spectator, and the New Statesman. Scruton explained that he embraced conservatism after witnessing the May 1968 student protests in France. From 1971 to 1992 he was lecturer, reader, and then Professor of Aesthetics at Birkbeck College, London, after which he was Professor of Philosophy at Boston University, from 1992 to 1995. From then on, he worked as a freelance writer and scholar, though he later held several part-time or temporary academic positions, including in the United States. In the 1980s he helped to establish underground academic networks in Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe, for which he was awarded the Czech Republic's Medal of Merit (First Class) by President Václav Havel in 1998. Scruton was knighted in the 2016 Birthday Honours for "services to philosophy, teaching and public education".