Roger Scruton
November 4th, 2009
Conservatism is itself a modernism, and in this lies the secret of its success. What distinguishes Burke from the French Revolutionaries is not his attachment to things past, but his desire to live fully in the present, to understand it in all its imperfections, and to accept it as the only reality offered to us….Burke…recognized the distinction between a backward-looking nostalgia, which is but another form of modern sentimentality, and a genuine tradition, which grants us the courage and the vision with which to live in the modern world.
-Roger Scruton, A Political Philosophy