 Conservatism can be further elucidated by contrasting it with liberalism. Both liberalism and socialism are more theoretically complex than conservatism, for two reasons: conservatism self-consciously rejects philosophical theorising; and, since academics tend towards the left, conservatism as a political philosophy continues to be neglected. (For instance, Scruton describes his book The Meaning of Conservatism (1980) as “dogmatics” rather than philosophy.) There could be no conservative theory of distributive justice to rival Rawls’, since, for conservatives, the problems that Rawls addresses do not exist. For them, politics does not concern the theoretically complex justification of ends, but rather facilitates the enjoyment of “non-political” ends such as “country”, “family” and “religion” (Ashford 1990: 40–1).