Intellectual Conservatism: From Burke to Scruton
Edited by Ferenc Hörcher and Daniel Pitt.
Routledge, 2025.
Hardcover, 246 pages, $133.
Reviewed by S.D. Whatley.
Until recently, good government meant the administration of things and the management of competing interests. Politics focused on issues and events, not ideas. Politics then embodied the title of Harold Lasswell’s 1936 book, Politics: Who Gets What, When, How.
All that has changed. Ideas are back, across the political spectrum.
Consider Liberal Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech in January 2026 at the World Economic Forum in Davos about a “rupture in the world order.” Or consider also what U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said at the Munich Security Conference in February 2026 about the essential Christian nature of western civilization. Both speeches stand out in large part because they move beyond discussions about who gets what, when, and how. Interest in the “intellectual foundations” that lie behind administrative politics has invaded mainstream discourse.
Ferenc Hörcher and Dan Pitt, editors and contributors of a new book, Intellectual Conservatism: From Burke to Scruton, seem timed to match this shift in popular discourse. Intellectual Conservatism offers a history of English political ideas to a new and motivated audience. Limiting focus on Britain paradoxically enhances the book’s usefulness in other countries.
Alexis de Tocqueville famously observed that the English have no taste for “general ideas.” “For the English, the human mind is torn from the contemplation of particular facts only with regret and sorrow.” Clinton Rossiter leveled a similar accusation at American conservatives in 1955. The conservative finds “political theory” “so foreign” that “he will not even vindicate his own way of life unless it is openly and dangerously attacked.” Hörcher and Pitt appear determined to show that conservatives do in fact have a taste for ideas.
Three themes in this collection stand out. First, both Hörcher and Pitt approached the work from a motivation to help. They did not write to win an argument or create a conservative purity test. Their generosity tempers the second theme: an embrace of the tension between theory and practice. They insist we need both theory and practice, and they refuse to generalize practice into theory or reduce theory into political strategy. Finally, their content assumes the essential role of particularity in our pursuit of wisdom. Wisdom lies through particulars; we must not systematize and universalize conservatism. Let’s unpack each of these in turn.
Both authors shared a long and close association with Sir Roger Scruton, the English philosopher who passed away in 2020. Hörcher was Scruton’s colleague and collaborator; Pitt read for his Masters in political philosophy under Scruton’s supervision.
Their book grew from the conference British Intellectual Conservatism: Past and Present held at Churchill College Cambridge, 2023, organized by Hörcher and Pitt. The agenda included panels on anti-intellectualism, Conservative Party policy making, market economy, the ‘New Conservatism’ of the 1920s, Margaret Thatcher, Toryism, and post-liberal conservative perspectives, the LSE Right, Salisbury, Michael Oakeshott, T.S. Eliot, political theology, and much more. Hörcher and Pitt used the agenda and speakers as a springboard.
Conservatism has always had to manage a sometimes raucous tension between the views of well-known conservative thinkers and the ideas promoted by the Conservative Party. Who gets to define conservatism? Hörcher and Pitt structure their book to say, emphatically, both. Intellectual Conservatism sections the first half of the book such that conservative thinkers and their views are on equal footing with party ideas and platforms (Parts 1 and 2). The last half addresses a conservative response to free speech (Part 3), religion, and monarchy (Parts 4).
Hörcher opens the book by addressing the relationship between academics and politicians. Conservatives have long viewed intellectuals with suspicion, and intellectuals are famous for attacking conservatives. For example, John Stuart Mill spoke about the “stupidity” in the Conservative Party and how its constitution made it the “stupidest party.” More importantly, intellectuals have a well-earned reputation for inflicting their ideas and abstractions on unsuspecting citizens. Hörcher doesn’t hide the tension; he leans into it. ”Conservative politicians, political conservatives, have good reasons to be afraid of intellectuals. But we are intellectuals, and we are also conservatives. And in that sense, we send a message to our politicians: Don’t be afraid [of] us. We don’t want to interfere in your business. There is a division of labor among us. You do the business [of politics]. We do our own business, which is thinking about politics. And the assumption is that politicians can make … use [of] the material.”
This tension between ideas and retail politics highlights the second theme and brings co-editor Dan Pitt’s experience to the fore. As an academic and Scruton’s former student, he emphasizes the salience of philosophy. At the same time, his experience in retail politics tempers and molds his theoretical knowledge. Pitt ran as a candidate in a by-election, placing second by only 23 votes. After months campaigning, meeting constituents, and promoting practical politics, he said, “Ideas impact on politics, and if you are losing at that ideational level, you are going to lose elections. And it has that saying of ‘In office but not in power,’ because your ideas are not in circulation.”
Pitt demonstrates his deep understanding of conservative ideas with his chapter on British constitutionalism. It offers one of the most concise but thorough, and still eminently readable, overviews of all the ways conservatism has been defined including ideology, philosophy, disposition, temperament, and more. Pitt pulls out a list of conservative principles from an examination of conservative thought: “(1) the organic nature of society; (2) scepticism of human’s reasoning powers; (3) the suspicion of grand political blueprints; (4) an historical-empirical approach to decision making; (5) a commitment to the past and future generations; (6) the wisdom of generations, tradition, and custom; and (7) a trustee model of representation.” He then shows how “Conservatism of the mind leads to conservatism in practice” by applying these principles to policy making. It is the densest chapter. Ostensibly, it’s a review of conservative constitutionalism. It’s actually a review of almost every flavor of conservative thought for the past 200 years condensed into a single chapter (158 references, 21 pages).
Which brings us to the final theme. Intellectual Conservatism is primarily a work of intellectual history. It embraces the particularity of an historical epistemology, again, animated by a desire to describe and help, not define or dictate. In effect, the authors use intellectual history to capitalize on the tension between theory and practice in an effort to make conservative thought deeper and more robust. “Conservatives need to take into consideration and debate and argue at two different levels,” Dan Pitt said. “One is the intellectual level. Sometimes referred to as intelligentsia politics. On the whole, conservatives don’t really like doing this. Especially the word: ‘It’s an ugly word for an ugly thing,’ Stanley Baldwin said.” Dan Pitt nods at Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences and continues, “Then the other is practical politics, which conservatives … seem to be much more happy with: going out, winning elections, putting leaflets through doors, campaigning, going on social media, and arguing about what’s happening in current affairs right here, right now.”
It shouldn’t surprise traditional conservatives that a book on intellectual conservatism pivots on particularities. They never say so explicitly, but the whole text assumes it. They include a chapter on universalism by Philip Blond, but the overall assumption highlights the editors’ belief that particularities matter a great deal. They follow Edmund Burke’s warning to “avoid the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction.”
Limiting discussion to 14 essays from leading thinkers on British conservatism creates surprising depth, breadth, and nuance. In just over 200 pages, Intellectual Conservatism raises a massive array of ideas including public safety, national finance, political power, statecraft, party renewal, monarchy, empire, expediency, “property-owning democracy”, intellectual defense against Labour and Socialism, human nature, industry, functions of the state, private property, capitalism, free markets, rights and responsibilities, education, emotion in politics, democracy, moral fibre, conservative vs liberal individualism, ownership, character development, shaping the intellectual and moral nature of the electorate, wealth distribution, one-nation conservatism, Thatcherism, restoring a British way of life, rationalism, rules, proceduralism, Victorian values, economic vs moral political objectives, family, religion, inherited traditions, natural rights, nature of politics, natural order, slavery, universal vs particular, transcendence, covenant vs contract, culture, and more.
Paradoxically, limiting the book’s scope to Britain expands its application to other countries. It creates distance and allows readers outside UK politics to learn without immediately thinking of how to refute what we read. Books written in North America, intended for a North American audience, carry a material risk of ending up in someone’s party platform. We must read them on high alert, attentive for intellectual landmines we might need to debate later in policy. Intellectual Conservatism removes that element. It allows us to ponder more deeply how the British experience could inform our own conservatism, without the stress of imagining the content being copied and pasted into policy. The limited scope also assumes a broader pedagogy. Much like teaching concepts using story or parable, Hörcher and Pitt convey theory by packaging it within the particularity of British politics that has been informed by intellectual conservatism. We can learn and, hopefully, repurpose ideas from the British experience and apply them to other jurisdictions.
The title, Intellectual Conservatism, could be confused as the pursuit of naked metaphysical abstractions Burke warned against. The work itself offers a case in point of how intellectual conservatives can explore conservatism as a body of thought using particularities. The methodology is reminiscent of induction but stops short of drawing systematic generalizations. It reflects the peculiar methodology of so much conservative thought: glorying in particularities, never letting go of multiple strands of complexity, while eschewing abstractions and over simplification. If you ever doubted whether it works, Hörcher and Pitt show it can be done.
Pitt closes the book with a chapter that dispatches common arguments against studying intellectual conservatism, such as, “Conservatives do not need to argue intellectually—it is a Left-wing thing.” Pitt points back to Sir Roger Scruton, who said it is “regrettable that politics has so extended its moral ambition” beyond its traditional domain of social thought. Pitt notes that, “despite its regrettable nature, conservatives now have to engage with the battle of ideas at a philosophical level.” And in typical conservative fashion, he closes with a warning. Pursuing an intellectual conservatism could risk conservatism losing “some of its essence or taken for grantedness” [italics original] but only if we insist on “systematizing and universalizing” it.
Roger Scruton wrote that, “From its beginnings in the world of the Enlightenment, conservatism has been engaged in a work of rescue.” Legacy ideologies have renewed salience given the failures of globalism, environmentalism, multiculturalism, and intersectional politics to name a few.
Fundamental questions about things such as human nature and political representation are back in vogue. If modernity marked an era in which first principles were ruled out of order, ours marks their return. Questions about first principles have become fashionable again. Ferenc Hörcher and Dan Pitt apply generosity to smooth contention between intellectuals and politicians, they embrace the tension between theory and practice, and they highlight the power of particularity as a source of political wisdom. The audience for old arguments has mushroomed, and editors Hörcher and Pitt deliver what it needs.
Shawn Whatley is a Munk Senior Fellow in Health Policy with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and a Past President of Civitas Canada. He is a physician and author of two policy books. He lives in Ontario, Canada.
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