I take what I said to be part of the Enlightenment. That's to say that unless you try to understand the historical context, the political context, all the things that your version of culture has been rejecting this evening, you won't win. We're less and less in a position where we can as it were look disdainfully on that. This is why we need ivory towers, isn't it? To knowledge factories. And if the only alternatives we have are knowledge factory or ivory tower were finished. There's gentlemen there. Terry, your observation about the importance of culture and nation-states now. But as I understand it, we're in an age which is no longer the age of
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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