Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2019972 in Books
• Published on: 1999-01-30
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 1.12" h x 6.32" w x 9.29" l, 1.64 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 350 pages

From Library Journal
In this collection of previously published essays, Scruton casts his philosophically conservative mind over a variety of subjects from Hegel to politics, from literature to art, and from aesthetics to the deficiencies of analytic philosophy. Each essay has been constructed with considerable care, and the positions taken are clearly stated and soundly argued. Though not every reader will concur with Scruton's views, there is much of value here. He shows, as have an increasing number of recent writers, that the philosopher-critic is alive and well. One can only hope that this trend continues, and that it will form an antidote to the deconstructionist mentality which has pervaded Western critical thought during the last few years. Recommended for all academic libraries.
- Terry Skeats, Bishop's Univ., Lennoxville, Quebec
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Roger Kimball, New York Times Book Review
"It is a great pity that we in the United States do not have our own Roger Scruton. As his new collection of essays reminds us, he is an accomplished philosopher who writes trenchantly about many important political, social and religious issues, who cares passionately about art and culture and who is also a brilliant conservative polemicist. . . .

"Mr. Scruton's other great virtue is his habit of assessing things from the inside, taking them on their own terms. If his judgments are often harsh, one nevertheless comes away feeling that he has made the best case possible for his subject. This makes his criticism more devastating yet also more generous than the criticism of most other commentators."

Peter Clarke, London Review of Books
"Scruton writes eloquently of the way in which social bonds, if refashioned in contractual form, 'become profane, a system of faade, a Disneyland version of what was formerly dignified and monumental.'"