Thread by @johnmilbank3

In his influential Polity Exchange paper Noel Malcolm contrasts ‘political’ approaches to human rights with ‘moral and philosophical’ approaches. I see this as a singular example of English ‘metaphysical illiteracy’ of which the Celtic nations are rarely so guilty.

Given this metaphysical illiteracy it’s quite hard to explain the many exceptions: Cudworth, Coleridge, Bradley, Whitehead etc, besides the metaphysical bent of so much English literature. But there’s a dominant strand at both elite and popular levels wishing to suppress this.

When Malcolm suggests that English declarations of civil rights from Magna Carta to 1689 implies no universal claims he is quite wrong. Church support in first case linked to invocations of natural law, in second British imperialism often assumed British universal exemplarity.

So in the one case Malcolm retreats to a pre-Lingard Protestant whiggish account of Magna Carta, in the other he ignores the often Anglican-based claims to universal disclosure of English constitutional and cultural particularity.

And Malcolm’s view that human rights are fundamentally rights against the state us entirely modern and in line with Hobbes, Locke and the American and French Revolutions. For an older view there was no duality of possessed right and reciprocal justice, nor of state vs society.

All of his ‘conservatism’ (like that of Scruton) is modern and liberal, never looking before the 17thC at best. Real conservatives always invoke the gothic and the genuinely classical and Biblical. Often they are ‘left-wing’ like Macintyre.

Nor do they see democracy as the most ultimate value.