Conservative Thinkers.

Conservative Thoughts, edited by Roger Scruton (Claridge, 339 pp., $27) Conservative Thinkers, edited by Roger Scruton (Claridge, 323 pp., $27)

THE ESSAYS in the twin volumes Conservative Thoughts and Conservative Thinkers are taken from The Salisbury Review, an English quarterly whose editor, Roger Scruton, is one of England's leading young conservative theorists. (The description stands even without the word "young.")

The dust-jacket calls the Review "Britain's most notorious intellectual journal." It's a haven for Reactionary Ideas and Politically Incorrect Thought that has sprung into existence under the pressure of Marxist intellectual tyranny. The belligerent assertions of Marxism haunt the pages of both books.

But unlike American conservatives, who tend to settle for "refuting" Marx by pointing out the superiority of Western to Communist economies, the Salisburians take Marx very seriously and try to answer him and his avatars thoroughly on every level. The effort is rewarding. Not only is Marx too powerful to be snubbed or dismissed; the political power and appeal of Marxism to the alienated intellectual has generated a whole style of looking at the world that we can recognize even in the lineaments of schools of thought that in America carry other labels: liberal, feminist, and so forth. Marxism remains the generic ideology, the systematic reductionism designed to delegitimate and destroy all the characteristic forms of Western life.

Every one of these essays deserves to be pondered separately. But since there are 42 of them, it would take all my space here even to list them. I can only say that these two books amount to a whole school of thought that American conservatives ought to acquaint themselves with, and quickly, too.

Conservative Thinkers is full of surprises. Johnson, Burke, Hayek, Voegelin, and Oakeshott are studied, of course. But so are Shakespeare, Hume, and Jane Austen, not to mention Joseph de Maistre, Louis de Bonald, and Santayana. Though Russell Kirk included Santayana in the pantheon of The Conservative Mind, American conservatives have continued to neglect him.

R. A. D. Grant's essay on Shakespeare deserves special mention. It is a seminal piece of work, the germ of what should be a great book (now in progress). Grant steps past the various interpretations that see Shakespeare as proto-Tory, proto-Marxist, or simply apolitical Observer of Mankind, and shows a definite commitment, implicit in most of the great plays, to a specific view of civil society. It's often been observed that Shakespeare's villains tend to be rationalists; Grant shows how they are forerunners of modern

ideologues, men of subversive intelligence who cunningly undermine the social-moral givens that a properly human life depends on. By showing that Shakespeare consciously anticipated the baneful possibilities we know from subsequent experience, Grant opens astounding new vistas: one might think we had pretty well taken Shakespeare's measure by now, however much we may admire him.

Ian Crowther rescues Johnson from the charge commonly leveled by progressives, that his conservatism can be laid to his neuroses: "I do not know of anyone attempting to explain away Johnson's abhorrence of slavery or his concern for the poor or his hatred for the eighteenth-century penal system by reference to the dark side of his personality." Bull's-eye.

Angela Ellis-Jones freshens up the conventional image of John Henry Newman by citing his benign view of the effects of the free market. It's odd to learn that Newman greatly influenced the French anarchist Georges Sorel.

Conservative Thoughts is full of unexpected reflections on language, sex, royalty, death, and such apparently unpolitical topics as "forgiveness" and "taste." These are thinkers who refuse to play on ideology's closed field.

Consider Ray Honeyford on "Education and Race": "By exploiting the enormous tolerance traditional in this country, the race lobby has managed so to induce and maintain feelings of guilt in the well-disposed majority, that decent people are not only afraid of voicing certain thoughts, they are uncertain even of their right to think them. . . . The term 'racism,' for instance, functions not as a word with which to create insight, but as a slogan designed to suppress constructive thought. It conflates prejudice and discrimination, and thereby denies a crucial conceptual distinction. . . . The word 'black' has been perverted. Every non-white is now, officially, 'black,' be he Indian, Pakistani, or Vietnamese. This gross and offensive dichotomy has an obvious purpose: the creation of an atmosphere of anti-white solidarity."

In a similar vein, Sally Shreir reflects on the manipulative quality of Marxist rhetoric: "There is no possibility of dissent, not least because there is no possibility of assent. A slogan, by its very nature, defies belief and replaces it with overt articulation and submission. One cannot believe in the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' because, in isolation, one cannot understand what it means, and if one did understand one would never be persuaded to believe it."

The prose is sometimes heavy going, partly because the challenge posed by the slogan-mongers forces the writers to be unnaturally precise. But tbe substance of the Salisburians always repays the occasional difficulty of reading them. Both these books are feasts of free thought, not only reasonable but marvelously attentive and sensitive to the full range of considerations that are truly relevant to politics. The essays don't form a neat pattern; they go off every which way, and whether a coherent philosophy can be gleaned from them is anybody's guess. But this doesn't diminish their value as fresh explorations, antidotes to the brutal resolutions of ideology.