Roger Scruton finds conservative thought on a “teeter totter” between those like Margaret Thatcher who, as he writes in his 2014 book, How to Be a Conservative, “when pressed for arguments…leaned too readily on market economics and ignored the deeper roots of conservatism in the theory and practice of society” and those like Winston Churchill who defend civilization but not markets. He noted this tension goes back to Edmund Burke and reflects that it goes to something fundamental: “All the things that matter to us, as soon as we realize how much they matter, we want to withdraw them from the whole business of exchange and proliferation and hug them to ourselves.”
His whole conversation with Peter Robinson as part of the Hoover Institution’s Uncommon Knowledge series is 45 minutes of engaging thought on immigration, Brexit, Donald Trump, and history.