Ferenc Hörcher

This paper provides an intellectual–historical reconstruction of New Classical Natural Law theory (Grisez–Finnis–George), arguing that it is inseparable from the late-twentieth-century movement John Haldane termed “analytical Thomism.” The school’s origins lie in the Catholic intellectual milieu of post-war Oxford and its transatlantic parallel. G. E. M. Anscombe, shaped by Dominican mentors and the moral crises of the Cold War and nuclear weapons, revived Thomistic–Aristotelian practical philosophy with analytical rigor. Her essay “Modern Moral Philosophy” (1958) and her classic book Intention (1957) established a research program of contemporary Thomism. A generation later, John Finnis, trained under the legal positivist H. L. A. Hart yet loyal to Catholic teaching, transformed Anscombe’s insights into systematic natural law jurisprudence. His Natural Law and Natural Rights (1980) combined Oxford analytical clarity with practical reasonableness. From the late 1960s, Finnis’s collaboration with Germain Grisez produced an updated traditional Thomism, a version of natural law competitive within mainstream analytical philosophy. The paper introduces two key followers (Haldane and Robert P. George) and a major challenger (Russell Hittinger). It presents this intellectual movement as one of the most cohesive contributions to contemporary moral, legal, and political philosophy.

This book explores the concept of civility in the context of culture and politics. The book’s primary assumption is that politics depends on, and is made possible by culture: that the realm of possibilities in politics is defined by the realm of what already exists in a particular culture. It is argued that whilst it is certainly possible to innovate in politics, all such innovation has a cultural background: it is impossible to imagine anything politically which is not already apparent culturally as a political potential. With this conceptual relationship in mind, civility is here presented as a set of crucial, explicit or implicit social norms. These norms provide a threshold for what is acceptable in interpersonal relationships and what is imaginable in the public domain. They have relevance because all public acts and words are expected to meet certain cultural, internalized standards of acceptance: those which define decent, socially acceptable behaviour and communication. Civility is the form of socially acceptable behaviour, consisting in essence of a set of constraints slowly developed by social cohabitation. These norms of civility, or practical virtue are valid for all interpersonal communications and so also encompass exchanges with external communities. Moreover, it is valid not only in times of peace and prosperity, but also defines what agents can do in conflicts, even brutal conflicts like war or civil war, as well as in times of hardship such as economic or financial crises. In this sense, to confront the major building blocks of the standards of civility, or what citizenship requires in politics and civil society in Western parliamentary democracies is a major precondition for making sense of contemporary politics. In this sense, this book claims, the Aristotelian tradition of politics still holds. An Aristotelian Philosophy of Civility is essential reading for all scholars and researchers of culture, society and politics as well as for all advanced students of social and political philosophy.

This article deals with the notion of the community, as it concerns legal, constitutional, and political thought. The present attempt aims to do two things. First, it would like to show the relevance of associations for political philosophy. In this, it will introduce the historical reconstructions of medieval associations and corporate personalities in the work of the nineteenth-century German legal historian, Otto von Gierke. Although Gierke is not unknown in the English-speaking work, there is a need to go back to its own historical context of the reception of medieval and Roman Law, in order to make a proper sense of this rather complex system of thought, as intended by its author, in a given intellectual, spiritual and political climate. Secondly, this chapter would like to focus on the reception of this thought in the Anglo-Saxon world. It will focus on two specific contexts. First, on the context of legal-constitutional thought, in the work of William Maitland. His Political Theories of the Middle Ages, a translation of a part of Gierke’s seminal work was crucial in the constitutional thought of modern Britain, and his interpretation of Gierke played a major role in this intellectual appropriation. It was crucial in the sense that it showed the connections between the Continental Roman and Canon Law traditions and the medieval roots of English common law. In our overview and interpretation of Maitland, Ernest Barker will also play a certain role. Finally, we shall have a look at the discussion of medieval corporate personalities in a contemporary philosophical dialogue and exchange of views. The analytical philosopher of British conservatism, Roger Scruton discussed this issue with John Finnis, a thoroughgoing and inventive neo-Thomist thinker, who tried to revitalise notions of Natural Law and the common good. Their dialogue shows that the late nineteenth-century reconstruction of medieval principles and institutions is relevant even today, in an Anglo-Saxon context as well.

While most of his readers have no problem classifying Scruton as a political philosopher of a conservative persuasion, his genuine interest in art is less well known to the general reader. It is therefore worth emphasising that his frame of mind can be better understood as fundamentally that of a philosopher of art and a cultural critic, while his conservatism is, in a way, only a side product, partly determined by his views on art (particularly on beauty) and on culture, and partly by his own political experiences in Paris, Central Europe and elsewhere. This thesis might seem to be somewhat courageous at first sight, given the political attacks against him during his life as a result of his conservative political views. However, the present summary of his thought is built on the assumption that his primary interest lay, in fact, in the arts and culture, while political philosophy was only of secondary importance to him.

This chapter provides a short overview of Scruton’s spiritual development, leading to his “conservative turn” and an introduction to the major influences on his political and cultural Bildung leading to his becoming a proper, if somewhat irregular philosopher. The crucial event is undoubtedly 1968. Scruton himself told an eye-witness account of the events in Paris, and their impact on his way of thinking, pushing him towards the conservative camp. After this eye-opening historic event, the next theme is his Cambridge studies, and its connection with his conservatism. His college during his PhD research was Peterhouse, home of British conservatism. This chapter gives short portrays of major academic figures who had an impact on Scruton’s character formation. The literary historian John Casey, the historian Maurice Cowling, and the art historian David Watkin all had an influence on his mindset. The literary historian F.R. Leavis was rather a role model, an embodiment of the intellectual who can all alone have an impact on his age, even if he is not part of the progressive camp. Finally, this chapter calls attention to the role legal education played in Scruton’s intellectual maturation.

After the above review of the education and formative years of Scruton, the philosopher, let us now turn to the active part of his career, his involvement in ideological struggles, journalism and political activism. These elements define this part of his life as a vita activa, an active confrontation with the state of affairs in politics, and a rather courageous attempt to make an impact on the thought of his day by popularising the political thought of conservatism, which was at the time lagging behind both in the ideological competition and in the theory-building efforts of academia.

This book has aimed to provide a comprehensive overview of the life and work of the late Sir Roger Scruton, probably the best known British conservative philosopher of the turn of the century, focusing on his characteristic parallel interest in the arts and politics. The framework of this introduction was built around the classical distinction between a life lived in action and one lived in reflection. Our claim made about action and reflection was that Scruton was unable or perhaps not prepared to make a definitive decision on this issue. In other words, he lived two lives in parallel: that of the professional philosopher, struggling with concepts, in order to clarify them, under the constraints of universal truth, and that of the public intellectual, ready to fight in order to exercise influence on the state of affairs, to get involved in public affairs, and to make his voice heard, in order to work for the common good.

The late Sir Roger Scruton was a Cambridge-educated philosopher, who had two major fields of interests: the philosophy of art and political philosophy. Both of these philosophies address a form of human activity: political philosophy focuses on the zoon politikon, the political being, while the philosophy of art describes the human being engaged in artistic activity, fascinated by beauty. This book tries to make sense of these two major themes of the philosopher. Politics and art can be viewed both as separate forms and as overlapping spheres of human activity. This first chapter is an introduction, about the relationship of philosophy, politics and art.

For much of his professional career, Scruton’s philosophy had two focuses: on the one hand, he was interested in political philosophy and on the other hand in aesthetics. While he is best known around the world for his pronounced conservative political philosophy, his main personal scholarly interest was in the theory of art. In his overall history of Modern Aesthetics, Paul Guyer could confidently claim that: “After Wollheim, the most significant British aesthetician has been Roger Scruton.” Scruton published a short introduction to general Aesthetics, titled Beauty, and two detailed analyses of the aesthetics of specific branches of art, The Aestheticsof Architecture and TheAesthetics of Music. In his early career he published two other works on general aesthetics, Art and Imagination: A Study in the Philosophy of Mind in 1974, and The AestheticUnderstanding: Essays in the Philosophy of Art and Culture in 1983. He also published Platonic dialogues; works of art in which art was a major theme. Scruton is also known as a practising artist: he composed operas which were publicly performed and wrote novels and poetry which were published.

Bringing prudence back into the centre of political philosophical discussion, this book assesses how far the Aristotelian notion can be of use in thinking about politics today. Antique, medieval and early modern discussions on practical wisdom are reconstructed and re-contextualised to show not only how our understanding of the virtue of 'prudence' has changed over time, but why it should be revived. Starting with basic Aristotelian principles, such as the relevance of cooperation and politics in human life, the significance of the virtues and character-formation for political actors, and the personal and communal resources of right action in politics, Ferenc Hörcher offers an evolutionary history of the concept of prudence. Moving on to incorporate the developments of the Roman and the Christian traditions, a contemporary conservative-republican political philosophy is built up. Special attention is given to the relevance of local customs and traditions as well as participation, compromise and moderation in political activity. The book demonstrates that Aristotelian notions should be used to describe the actions and speeches of people active in politics, without losing sight of the normative dimension. In doing so, it presents an original argument which is both different from mainstream contemporary political philosophy and beneficial to our understanding of the role of practical reason in politics.

In an effort to give a historical depth to recent discussions on taste in Aesthetic theory, this paper recovers a 19th century Hungarian paradigm. While taste first came to the forefront of philosophical reflection with the Enlightenment and especially with Kant, by now there is a growing literature on the survival of that discourse in the first half of the 19th century. The present author contributed to the research, which tried to show that in Hungary Count István Széchenyi, an influential political reformer, can be regarded as an author, who for socio-political reasons relied heavily on the British discourse of politeness and taste. This paper aims to show that the same discourse lived on and was employed in the second half of the 19th century in socio-political debates. The example is Baron Zsigmond Kemény, an admirer and follower of Széchenyi, who transformed the discourse into a bourgeois political-educational program.

This paper wants to address the Aristotelian analysis of the concept of mimesis from a social and cultural angle. It is going to show that mimesis is crucial if we want to understand why the institution of the theatre played such a crucial role in the civic educational programme of classical Athens. The paper’s argument is that the magic spell of theatrical imitation, its aesthetic machinery was exploited by the city for civic educational function. Dramas, and in particular tragedies helped to articulate the city’s political expectations from the citizens, and they achieved it with far better efficiency than any other medium of propaganda which was available in those days. It will first reconstruct the duality within the internal structure of the Aristotelian account of mimesis in Poetics: it will show both 1.) the aesthetic and 2.) the socio-cultural dimensions of his theory of civic initiation through dramatic imitation. In the second part it will compare this Greek cultural context with a similar context in Rome in the activity and writings of Cicero. Finally, the paper presents the Renaissance republican context of early modern Europe, which also connected politico-moral education with the idea of mimesis.