Recently the New Statesman initiated a series of articles on “the state of the right” with a piece by historian Robert Saunders entitled “The closing of the conservative mind”.
That title obviously has a conscious resonance of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, denouncing higher education’s failure of democracy in the United States, and John Gray’s essay on The closing of the liberal mind, published in the New Statesman three years ago. There is also, presumably, an implied reference to Russell Kirk’s classic exposition of Burkean conservatism, The Conservative Mind.
Robert Saunders is in command of his brief, as one would expect of a professional political historian, taking his readers on an informative tour of Tory history and thought. He does so, however, with unfriendly intent, as his closing paragraphs betray. Onto an accurate narrative of the Conservative Party’s past he grafts an inaccurate analysis of its present predicament. It would have been jejune of readers to imagine that the New Statesman intended to do Toryism any favours (cf. Sir Roger Scruton).
