I'm not sure that in a broad sense of political, there is a political question, of course. What kind of society do people understand their own lives and each other as ends in themselves? That's much older than Marx. Romantic conservatives, like Burke, were among the first to raise this question. This cannot be done from the top by political imposition or by any revolutionary programme. It has to be done from below through the free association of individuals who come to respect each other through their shared activities. And that's where art perhaps can do something, but of course, Burke also thought that religion had to be there too.
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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