The greatest, the most wildly successful revolutionary movement of the modern period was revolutionary nationalism. In many ways a very generous-minded and progressive idea in its time. What happens from the mid-20th century onwards is that that too becomes increasingly unviable. Culture could no longer take the high ground in relation to a politics which it had always been rather, rather, disdainful or rather suspicious of. It's for us today, what people are ready to kill for, or if you like to die for.
What really divides the left and the right? To answer this question, Intelligence Squared brought together two giants of British intellectual culture for an ideological reckoning: Terry Eagleton, literary critic and long-time hero of the radical left, and Roger Scruton, right-wing philosopher who has written on everything from economic theory to literature, and architecture to wine. What we heard was two two irreducibly different views of the world, where each tries hard to understand the other’s view.
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