Abstract
Over the last decade it has ceased to be either polite or politic for British subjects to defend the ‘national idea’ as the foundation of political order. Or rather, you can defend that idea on behalf of others — at least if they are engaged in some ‘struggle for national liberation’ — but not on behalf of your own community and kind. Indeed, you should be careful not to use words like ‘kind’, ‘race’, or ‘kin’. Loyalties, if they are not universalist, must be expressed surreptitiously, in the self-deprecating language of one confessing to a private fault. In a recent publication, Professor Bikhu Parekh shows why there is a need for caution. Parekh summarises a nationalist view (which he attributes to various people, including myself), in ‘four basic premises’:
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Notes and References
Bikhu Parekh, The “New Right” and the Politics of Nationhood’, in N. Deakin (ed.), The New Right: Image and Reality (London, The Runnymede Trust, 1986).
J. G. Herder, J. G. Herder on Social and Political Culture (Cambridge, 1969).
J. G. Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation (London and Chicago, 1922).
Ernest Renan, Qu’est ce qu’une nation? (Paris, 1882).
Lord Acton, ‘Nationality’ in The History of Freedom and Other Essays, ed. J. N. Figgis and R. V. Laurence (London, 1907).
See B. Parekh, Contemporary Political Thinkers (Oxford, 1982).
Henry Sidgwick, The Elements of Politics (London, 1891).
J. S. Mill, On Liberty (London, 1859).
John Gray, The Politics of Culture Diversity’, The Salisbury Review, 7 (September 1988): 38–44.
Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution (New York, 1985).
Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge, 1982).
Charles Taylor, Philosophy and the Human Sciences (Cambridge, 1985).
So argues, for example, Sir Isaiah Berlin, in ‘Nationalism: Past Neglect and Present Power’, in Against the Current (New York, 1980).
See Elie Kedourie, Nationalism (London, 1960).
See R. A. D. Grant, ‘Shakespeare as a Conservative Thinker’, in R. Scruton (ed.), Conservative Thinkers (London, 1988).
See the commentary by H. T. Buckle, History of Civilization in England (London, 1864): 491.
See the painstaking demolition by Jacques Barzun, Race: A Study in Modern Superstition (London, 1938).
The dilemma that this poses for the contemporary Jew is interestingly unfolded in Alan Montefiore, ‘The Jewish Religion —Universal Truth and Particular Tradition’, Tel Aviv Review, 1 (1988): 166–86.
Sir Henry Maine, Ancient Law (London, 1890).
See note 7 above, and also Ronald Dworkin, Law’s Empire (London, 1986).
Kenneth Minogue, Nationalism (New York, 1967): 154.
Régis Debray, Critique de la Raison Politique (Paris, 1981): 178.
J. Stalin, Marxism and the National Question (1913)
Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age (Oxford, 1962).
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, ‘Repentance and Self-Limitation in the Life of Nations’, in From Under the Rubble (London, 1976).
John H. Scharr, ‘The Case for Patriotism’, American Review, 17 (May 1973): 62–3.
See Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews (London, 1987): 238.
See Antoine Fattal, he statut légal des non-musulmanes en pays d’Islam (Beirut, Imprimerie Catholique, 1958).
Alain Finkielkraut, La défaite de la pensée (Paris, 1987).
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© 1990 Roger Scruton
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Scruton, R. (1990). In Defence of the Nation. In: Clark, J.C.D. (eds) Ideas and Politics in Modern Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20686-5_4
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