In the article I discuss Roger Scruton’s opposition between utopian optimism and anti- -utopian pessimism. I show how it connects with the concepts of politics of faith and politics of skepticism introduced by Michael Oakeshott. Then I explain the relationship between the attitude of skeptical moderation and philosophical realism.

This essay presents an intellectual profile of Roger Scruton. Its contents have been gathered from personal reminiscences of the author about their friendly encounters and discussions of books that inspired them both when Scruton was involved in the activities of the anti-communist opposition in East-Central Europe. His motives and ventures are tentatively reconstructed. He has been remembered in Poland as a conservative thinker and intellectual figure with views that are shown here against the background of his past and in the context of his efforts to understand religion with its practices, origin, the role in Western and local communities, and its bearing on the changes that have occurred European culture.

The purpose of this paper is to reconstruct Roger Scruton’s views on patriotism and the attitudes of nationalism and oikophobia that endanger proper love of homeland. According to Scruton, patriotism is identical with loyalty to the people who inhabited a certain territory and share common culture, customs and history. The feeling of national loyalty so understood is peaceful by its nature and stabilizes the democratic system. Besides patriotism, Scruton distinguishes two attitudes, of worship of one’s nation and of hostility towards it. The first attitude may transform into nationalism, and then deifies nation and leads to wars and conflicts in history. Unlike the former, the attitude of hostility towards own nation (oikophobia) justifies development of transnational institutions that limited sovereignty of the democratic nation-states and – indirectly – undermine the sovereignty of one’s people. In the final part of the paper I paraphrase the concepts of nation presupposed in the attitudes of patriotism, nationalism and oikophobia, as they are discussed in the theoretical apparatus used by Leszek Nowak in his deformative conception of culture.

In the article I present a concise view of the conservative image of the world, inspired by the works of Roger Scruton. His vision starts as a moral and political project, but then goes on to turn into a theory of culture, education and aesthetic experience. Although the project was originally intended as devoid of any religious justification, it is possible to see religion as a complement or an equivalent to the conservative attitude, as it is expressed in private life. Religious language can be understood as a useful, personal, symbolic expression of the conservative attitude to life. Scruton also undertook to defend the humane face of philosophy, by which I mean his conviction that philosophy should resist reductive tendencies of natural science, and instead should strive to develop better understanding of the essential works of art and literature known in the Western canon.

Roger Scruton refers to Thomas Stearns Eliot in almost every one of his books, but despite the undoubtedly fundamental influence, which Eliot had exerted on the development of Scruton’s outlook, apart from a short article entitled Eliot and Conservatism, Scruton did not devote a separate work to Eliot’s thought. As I try to show this is due to the fact that Scruton was not so much a scholar of Eliot, as a continuator of his thought – not merely an expert on his philosophy and poetry, but an inheritor of his spiritual legacy. Both Eliot and Scruton belong to a current, which may rightly be called conservative philosophy of culture. In this paper I outline the conception of culture advanced by Eliot, and show how Scruton draws on this conception in his own spiritual development.