Volume 33, Number 20 · December 18, 1986
Sex in the Head
By Martha C. Nussbaum
Sexual Desire: A Moral Philosophy of the Erotic
by Roger Scruton
Free Press, 428 pp., $25.00
Roger Scruton is a Wagnerian romantic and a Thatcherite conservative; a tentative, questioning philosopher who is enamored of dogmatic political conclusions; a subtle writer on cultural diversity who is also drawn to making sweeping biological claims about human nature. These are some of the contradictions that inhabit his uneven, exasperating, yet never trivial new book. Scruton's career displays this complexity. A Reader in philosophy at Birkbeck College, London, he has written valuable books and articles on aesthetics, the imagination, the significance of culture. At the same time, he has written conservative journalism of a rather narrow and polemical type and served enthusiastically as an adviser to the Thatcher government.
Review, 4107 words
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