Because they have disbarred themselves from having a mature moral sense, some people on the ‘left’ find it very difficult to argue, to cope with those who fundamentally disagree with them without becoming angry or prematurely contemptuous.  The ‘right-wing’ intellectual, in contemporary Europe at least, is protected from such narrowness and absolutism by having to work in an intellectually hostile environment.  He is likely to be surrounded by people, varying in quality from the clever and honest to the dim and dishonest, who disagree with him.

(Lincoln Allison, Right Principles: A Conservative Philosophy of Politics [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984], 76)