Roger Scruton

• 1. Introduction

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  Roger Scruton was standing in the Latin Quarter of Paris in May 1968, watching students overturn cars, smash windows and tear up cobblestones. The English philosopher later said that for the first time in his life he "felt a surge of political anger". He asked his friends what the protesters wanted to achieve. All he got back, he recalled, was "ludicrous Marxist gobbledegook". Standing in that street, he made up his mind: "I knew I wanted to conserve things rather than pull them down."

  That decision shaped a career of more than 50 books, on subjects ranging from architecture and art to philosophy, politics and religion. It also shaped a life of friends and enemies in unusual places. What does a philosopher pay for choosing the unfashionable side inside a university? Why would a thinker who cared so much about beauty end up smuggling books across a Communist border? And what happens when the opinions of a public thinker are played back to him, edited, in front of a government?

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• 2. A Grammar School Boy

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  Roger Scruton was born in Buslingthorpe, Lincolnshire, and raised with his two sisters in High Wycombe and Marlow. Even his surname was a fairly recent invention. His grandfather Matthew's birth certificate gave his name as Matthew Lowe, after his mother Margaret, and listed no father at all. For reasons nobody knows, Margaret decided to raise her son as Matthew Scruton. Roger wondered whether she had worked at Scruton Hall in Yorkshire, and whether her child was conceived there.

  His father, John "Jack" Scruton, grew up in a back-to-back house on Upper Cyrus Street in Ancoats, an inner-city district of Manchester. A scholarship took Jack to Manchester High School. Roger told The Guardian that his father despised the upper classes and loved the countryside. His mother, Beryl, born Haynes, preferred romantic fiction and entertained "blue-rinsed friends". She cherished an ideal of gentlemanly conduct, Scruton said, which his father set out with relish to destroy.

  The family lived in a pebbledashed semi-detached house on Hammersley Lane in High Wycombe. Both parents had been raised as Christians but thought of themselves as humanists, so the house was, in Scruton's phrase, a "religion-free zone". Relations with his father were hard for the whole family. In Gentle Regrets, published in 2005, Scruton wrote that in such a home "the hunger for affection is cut off at every point by the fear of judgement."

  After passing the 11-plus exam, he attended the Royal Grammar School High Wycombe from 1954 to 1962. He left with distinctions in three A-levels: pure and applied mathematics, physics and chemistry. The results brought an open scholarship in Natural Sciences to Jesus College, Cambridge, and a state scholarship besides. When he told his family about the Cambridge place, his father stopped speaking to him. Scruton also writes that he was expelled soon afterwards. During one of his plays, the headmaster found the school stage on fire and a half-naked girl putting out the flames.

  At Cambridge he had meant to read Natural Sciences. On the very first day he switched to Moral Sciences, which meant philosophy, with A. C. Ewing as his supervisor. Like virtually every grammar-school boy there, he felt socially estranged, yet he said he felt "spiritually at home". He took a double first in 1965. Then he went abroad, teaching at the University of Pau in France, where he met his first wife, Danielle Laffitte, and spending time in Rome. His mother died around then. She had been diagnosed with breast cancer and had a mastectomy just before he went up to Cambridge.

  He began his doctorate at Jesus College in 1967 and became a research fellow at Peterhouse from 1969 to 1971. Cambridge awarded his PhD in January 1973, for a thesis called "Art and imagination, a study in the philosophy of mind", supervised by Elizabeth Anscombe. That thesis became his first book, and it pointed him toward a career in aesthetics.

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• 3. The Salisbury Review

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  Birkbeck College in London teaches mostly adult students in the evenings, and Scruton joined its teaching staff in 1971. He and Laffitte, who taught French at Putney High School, lived in a Harley Street apartment once occupied by Delia Smith. They married in September 1973 at the Brompton Oratory, a Catholic church in Knightsbridge, and divorced in 1979. Evening teaching left Scruton's days free, so from 1974 to 1976 he studied law at the Inns of Court School of Law. He was called to the Bar in 1978 but never practised, because he could not take the year off work that a pupillage required.

  In 1974 he helped found a dining club called the Conservative Philosophy Group, together with Hugh Fraser, Jonathan Aitken and John Casey. The club set out to build an intellectual basis for conservatism. Margaret Thatcher attended meetings before she became prime minister. In 1975 she reportedly told one gathering: "The other side have got an ideology they can test their policies against. We must have one as well."

  By Scruton's own account, he was the only conservative at Birkbeck, apart from the woman who served meals in the Senior Common Room. His third book, The Meaning of Conservatism, appeared in 1980, and he said it damaged his academic prospects. Colleagues vilified him over it, he told The Guardian. The Marxist philosopher G. A. Cohen of University College London reportedly refused to teach a seminar alongside him, although the two later became friends. Scruton nonetheless became a reader by 1980, then won a chair in 1985 as Professor of Aesthetics.

  In 1982 he became founding editor of The Salisbury Review, a journal that championed conservatism in opposition to Thatcherism. He kept the job until 2001. The Review was set up by the Salisbury Group, a body of Tories founded in 1978 by Diana Spearman and Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, with help from the Peterhouse Right. That label covered conservatives linked to the Cambridge college, among them Maurice Cowling, David Watkin and the mathematician Adrian Mathias. In 1983 the circulation stood below 1,000, though Martin Walker argued that the figure understated the journal's influence.

  At first Scruton wrote most of the articles himself, under pseudonyms. "I had to make it look as though there was something there in order that there should be something there!" he said. In the first issue he argued that conservatives needed dominance in intellectual life, because only that could create "a climate of opinion favourable to the conservative cause." The journal attacked nuclear disarmament campaigners, egalitarianism, feminism, foreign aid, multiculturalism and modernism.

  In 1984 the Review published a piece by Ray Honeyford, a headmaster in Bradford, questioning the benefits of multicultural education. Honeyford was forced to retire and lived for a time under police protection. The British Association for the Advancement of Science accused the Review of scientific racism. The philosophy department at the University of Glasgow boycotted a talk Scruton had been invited to give. He decided that his position as a university professor had become untenable, yet he said the price was worth paying for "the sheer relief of uttering the truth."

  The 1980s made him a prolific author. Thirteen of his non-fiction books appeared between 1980 and 1989, along with a first novel, Fortnight's Anger, in 1981. The most contentious was Thinkers of the New Left, published in 1985. It gathered Review essays attacking 14 prominent intellectuals, including E. P. Thompson, Michel Foucault and Jean-Paul Sartre. The Guardian reported that the book was remaindered after "derision and outrage", and Scruton said the reaction left him very depressed. In 1987 he founded his own publisher, the Claridge Press, which he sold to the Continuum International Publishing Group in 2002.

  From 1983 to 1986 he also wrote a weekly column for The Times, on music, wine and motorbike repair as well as on fiercer matters. The features editor, Peter Stothard, said no writer he had commissioned had provoked more rage. Scruton's first column, "Why politicians are all against real education", warned that making universities relevant would produce "a new generation of well-informed philistines".

  In 2002 Scruton tallied what the editorship had cost him. The list included "many thousand hours of unpaid labour", "a hideous character assassination in Private Eye", "three lawsuits, two interrogations, one expulsion" and "the loss of a university career in Britain". "And it was worth it," he added. The institutions that had turned him away came round eventually, and in 2008 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy.

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• 4. Underground Seminars

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  In a cellar in Czechoslovakia, students sat university examinations, and their papers left the country in a diplomatic bag. Scruton helped make that possible. From 1979 to 1989 he supported dissidents under Communist Party rule, linking the country's dissident academics with colleagues in Western universities. Through the Jan Hus Educational Foundation, he and other academics travelled to Prague and Brno to back an underground education network begun by the Czech dissident Julius Tomin.

  The visitors smuggled in books and organised lectures. Eventually they arranged for students to work toward a Cambridge external degree in theology, the only faculty that answered their request for help. Courses were structured, translations circulated in samizdat, which means secretly copied typescripts, and books were printed.

  In 1985 Scruton was detained in Brno and then expelled from the country. The dissident Bronislava Müllerová watched him leave. She recalled a broad empty space between the two border posts, with no one in sight but a single soldier, and "across that broad empty space trudged an English philosopher, Roger Scruton, with his little bag into Austria." On the 17th of June that year he was placed on the Index of Undesirable Persons. He wrote that he had also been followed during visits to Poland and Hungary.

  In 1990 he took a year's sabbatical from Birkbeck and spent it working in Brno. That year he registered Central European Consulting, a company set up to offer business advice in post-communist Central Europe.

  Recognition came in several countries. In 1993 the Czech city of Plzeň gave him its First of June Prize. In 1998 President Václav Havel presented him with the Czech Republic's Medal of Merit, First Class. In June 2019 Polish President Andrzej Duda gave him the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland, "for supporting the democratic transformation in Poland". In November 2019 the Czech Senate awarded him a silver medal. The following month, at a ceremony in London, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán presented him with the Hungarian Order of Merit, Commander's Cross with Star.

  Scruton was sharply critical of Western figures, Eric Hobsbawm in particular, who "chose to exonerate" the crimes of former communist regimes. He turned his own experience of dissident life in 1980s Prague into a novel, Notes from Underground, in 2014. Writing in 2019, he said he had admired Poles, Hungarians and Romanians, but it was "the shy, cynical Czechs to whom I lost my heart and from whom I have never retrieved it."

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• 5. Beauty Matters

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  In March 2009 Scruton stood up at an Intelligence Squared debate, seconding the historian David Starkey, and proposed the motion that "Britain has become indifferent to beauty". He held up a picture of Botticelli's The Birth of Venus beside a picture of the supermodel Kate Moss. Later that year he wrote and presented a BBC Two documentary, Why Beauty Matters. In it he argued that beauty should return to its traditional place in art, architecture and music. He wrote that he received more than 500 emails from viewers, and all but one thanked him for saying what needed saying.

  He tied beauty to faith. In 2018 he argued that belief in God makes for more beautiful architecture, and he pointed to Venice, whose flowering of aesthetic effort was "rooted in faith and watered by penitential tears". Any settlement built today, he said, should begin "with an act of consecration".

  Behind the television argument lay decades of scholarship. Scruton trained in analytic philosophy but was drawn to other traditions. In 2012 he wrote that philosophy quickly assumes "a thin and withered countenance" when it wanders away from art and literature. Opening a journal such as Mind or The Philosophical Review, he said, brought an immediate sinking of the heart.

  His first book, Art and Imagination, appeared in 1974. It argued that aesthetic interest differs from other kinds because it appreciates something "for its own sake". The Aesthetics of Architecture followed in 1979, then The Aesthetic Understanding in 1983, The Aesthetics of Music in 1997 and Beauty. In A History of Modern Aesthetics, Paul Guyer wrote that after Richard Wollheim, the most significant British aesthetician has been Scruton. A two-day conference at Durham University assessed his impact in 2008. In 2012 Palgrave Macmillan published a volume of essays, Scruton's Aesthetics, edited by Andy Hamilton and Nick Zangwill.

  His book Sexual Desire, from 1986, drew praise from philosophers who disagreed with him. The philosopher of religion Christopher Hamilton called it the most interesting and insightful account of sexual desire in analytic philosophy. Martha Nussbaum, who reviewed it in 1986, credited Scruton in 1995 with the most interesting philosophical attempt yet to work through the morality of treating persons as sex partners.

  According to Jonathan Dollimore, the book rests on a Hegelian idea that every rational being aims at building the self, which means recognising the other as an end in itself. Scruton saw perversion as sexual release that avoids or abolishes the other, and judged it narcissistic. Nussbaum countered that he did not apply his principle of otherness evenly, for instance to relationships between adults and children.

  His 1990 essay "Sexual morality and the liberal consensus" went further. Scruton wrote that homosexuality leads to the "de-sanctifying of the human body", and he considered it justified to instil feelings of revulsion toward it in children. In 2010 he told The Guardian that he would no longer defend the view that such revulsion can be justified.

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• 6. Ideas of Order

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  Scruton named six intellectual heroes: Edmund Burke, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, John Ruskin and T. S. Eliot. He described The Meaning of Conservatism as "a somewhat Hegelian defence of Tory values in the face of their betrayal by the free marketeers". He backed Margaret Thatcher but doubted her faith in the market as a cure for everything. After the Falklands War, he thought she had "recognised that the self-identity of the country was at stake".

  Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in 1790, did the most to persuade him. Burke wrote about revolution rather than socialism, yet Scruton found his reasoning applicable. Utopian promises, he concluded, come attached to an abstract picture of the mind that bears little relation to how most people think. History has no direction, and people pull together toward a common goal only in crises such as war. Organising a whole society that way requires a real or imagined enemy, which explains to him the strident tone of socialist writing.

  Society, Scruton argued, is held together by authority and the rule of law, not by the imagined rights of citizens. Obedience he called "the prime virtue of political beings", and he wrote that real freedom is the other side of it. He also took from Burke the point that most parties to the social contract are either dead or not yet born. To throw away customs and institutions, he said, is to give the living a dictatorial dominance over earlier and later generations.

  Some beliefs that look like prejudice may be valuable, he wrote, because "our most necessary beliefs may be both unjustified and unjustifiable, from our own perspective". His example was a prejudice favouring modesty in women and chivalry in men. It may help sexual relationships stay stable and children be raised well, even though nobody offers those as reasons. Such a belief is easy to show irrational, but discarding it brings a real loss.

  In Arguments for Conservatism, published in 2006, he described people as creatures of limited and local affections. Territorial loyalty, he argued, lies at the root of every government where law and liberty prevail. Every expansion of jurisdiction beyond the nation state weakens accountability. He saw conservatism and conservation as two sides of one policy of husbanding resources, from laws and customs to the environment. His support for Brexit followed from the same view: he saw the European Union as a threat to British sovereignty, and he opposed the Common Agricultural Policy.

  He defined totalitarianism as the absence of any constraint on central authority. Its advocates feed on resentment, he argued, and once in power they abolish institutions such as law, property and religion that create authority. Revolutions, in his account, are made from above in the name of the people, by an aspiring elite. Newspeak mattered to him because it swaps language that describes reality for language that avoids it. He defined postmodernism as the claim that truth and meaning have no grounds, so that every dispute becomes a contest of power.

  Scruton was an Anglican, and in 2013 he published Our Church, a defence of the relevance of the Church of England. Following Kant, he held that human beings have a transcendental dimension, a sacred core revealed in their capacity for self-reflection. On God's existence he said that reason carries us only so far. The leap of faith, he said, is "a leap over reason's edge", and no more irrational than falling in love. He also gave morality a dark side. Moral education should be "endarkening" as well as enlightening, closing off certain paths as forbidden places where neither profit nor loss has authority.

  In a 1991 column for the Los Angeles Times, he praised constitutional monarchy as "the light above politics". He argued that losing monarchy had precipitated 70 years of conflict in Central Europe. His views on the union were less fixed. In 2014 he said he supported English independence. In 2019 he told the New Statesman he had never really favoured it, and that England should pursue it only if Scottish independence became a real political force.

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• 7. Scrutopia and Beyond

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  In 1992 Scruton moved to Boston, Massachusetts, as professor of philosophy at Boston University, where he stayed until 1995. For one semester a year he taught an elementary philosophy course and a graduate course on the philosophy of music. Two books grew from those classes, including Modern Philosophy: A Survey in 1994. In 1993 he bought Sunday Hill Farm in Brinkworth, Wiltshire. It began as 35 acres, later grew to 100, and came with a 250-year-old farmhouse. He called it "Scrutopia".

  While teaching in Boston, he flew back to England every weekend to go fox hunting. At a meet of the Beaufort Hunt he met Sophie Jeffreys, an architectural historian. Their engagement was announced in The Times in September 1996, and they married later that year. Two children followed, in 1998 and 2000.

  Hunting gave him a line that summed up his life. In On Hunting, from 1998, he wrote that his life divided into three parts: "In the first I was wretched; in the second ill at ease; in the third hunting." His Animal Rights and Wrongs, published in 2000, sorted human duties to animals into three kinds. Pets receive "honorary membership of the moral community". Animals kept for use call for a clear duty of care. Wild animals form the third group. Rights, he argued, come with burdens, and "your right may be my duty". As a deontologist, he dismissed Peter Singer's utilitarian Animal Liberation as containing little or no philosophical argument.

  In 1999 the couple founded Horsell's Farm Enterprises, a PR firm whose clients included Japan Tobacco International and Somerfield. That year the Pet Shop Boys sued Scruton and his publisher for libel. His 1998 book An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture had suggested that the duo's songs were largely the work of sound engineers. The group settled for undisclosed damages.

  A larger storm broke in 2002. The Guardian reported that Scruton had written about smoking without disclosing that Japan Tobacco International paid him £54,000 a year. From 1999 to 2007 the Scrutons produced a quarterly paper on state control of risk, The Risk of Freedom Briefing, sponsored by the company. Scruton also wrote articles defending smoking, including a 65-page pamphlet in 2000 criticising the World Health Organization's anti-smoking campaign.

  The payments surfaced through a leaked email from September 2001, signed by his wife. It asked the company to raise a monthly fee of £4,500 to £5,500, in return for Scruton aiming to place an article every two months in outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, the Spectator and the New Statesman. Scruton said the email had been stolen and that he had never concealed his connection with the company. The fallout was swift. The Financial Times ended his contract as a columnist, and the Wall Street Journal suspended his contributions. The Institute of Economic Affairs promised an author-declaration policy, Chatto & Windus withdrew from book negotiations, and Birkbeck removed his visiting-professor privileges.

  The damage to his consultancy, together with the Hunting Act 2004 banning fox hunting in England and Wales, pushed the family toward the United States. In 2004 they bought Montpelier, an 18th-century plantation house near Sperryville, Virginia. Scruton set up Montpelier Strategy LLC to promote it as a venue for weddings and similar events. From 2005 to 2009 he was research professor at the Institute for the Psychological Sciences in Arlington, Virginia. In 2009 he worked at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., where he wrote Green Philosophy. The family decided against a permanent move and sold the house that year.

  Alongside the controversies ran quieter pleasures. From 2001 to 2009 he wrote a wine column for the New Statesman, and part of it fed into I Drink Therefore I Am: A Philosopher's Guide to Wine. He was also a largely self-taught composer, with some early guidance from his friend David Matthews. His one-act chamber opera The Minister dates from 1994. His two-act opera Violet, from 2005, portrays the harpsichordist Violet Gordon-Woodhouse and was performed twice at the Guildhall School of Music in London. Scruton wrote the libretto for Anna, a two-act opera by Matthews, which premiered at The Grange Festival on the 14th of July 2023.

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• 8. Dismissal and Farewell

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  In 2016 Prince Charles knighted Scruton at Buckingham Palace, with his family in attendance. The honour recognised "services to philosophy, teaching and public education". Two years later came a government appointment that would bring one of the sharpest public tests of his career. In November 2018 Communities Secretary James Brokenshire named him unpaid chair of the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission, created to promote better home design.

  Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs objected, citing remarks Scruton had made years before. He had called "Islamophobia" a "propaganda word" and homosexuality "not normal". He had also made allegedly conspiratorial comments about the Jewish businessman George Soros.

  In April 2019 the New Statesman published an interview with Scruton by George Eaton. To promote it, Eaton posted edited extracts on Twitter, which he called "a series of outrageous remarks". Hours later Brokenshire dismissed Scruton from the commission. Eaton then posted a photograph of himself on Instagram drinking champagne, captioned with a celebration of getting Scruton sacked. Writing in The Spectator the next day, Scruton described a Britain entering "a dangerous social condition", in which opinions that conflict with a narrow set of orthodoxies are punished by self-appointed vigilantes.

  On the 25th of April, Douglas Murray, a colleague of Scruton's, published details of the full recording in The Spectator and called the interview a "hit job". The audio suggested that the tweets and the article had left out context. On Soros, Scruton had said that anyone who doubted a Soros empire in Hungary had not observed the facts. The article dropped his next words: "it's not necessarily an empire of Jews; that's such nonsense." Eaton had tweeted that Scruton said each Chinese person was a replica of the next. The transcript gave the full sentence: "In a sense they're creating robots out of their own people by so constraining what can be done." That suggested he was talking about the Chinese Communist Party.

  The New Statesman published the full transcript. On the 2nd of May its readers' editor, Peter Wilby, wrote that Eaton seemed to have "approached the interview as a political activist, not as a journalist". Two months later the magazine officially apologised, and a few days afterwards Brokenshire apologised too. A week later Scruton was reappointed as co-chair of the commission, alongside Nicholas Boys Smith.

  In July 2019 he learned he had lung cancer and began treatment that included chemotherapy. He died at Cromwell Hospital in London on the 12th of January 2020, at the age of 75. The next day Prime Minister Boris Johnson called him "the greatest modern conservative thinker". The Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa said Scruton knew a thousand subjects better than an expert, "because, in fact, he was a humanist in the classical style". Murray remembered him as "one of the kindest, most encouraging, thoughtful, and generous people you could ever have known". Even a critic of his aesthetics, Michael Shindler, wrote in Church Life that Scruton stood in "lonesome majesty" as the artistic tradition's greatest defender against modernity's upheaval.

  His funeral took place on the 24th of January 2020 at Malmesbury Abbey, attended by several peers, Conservative politicians and Viktor Orbán. The Reverend Oliver Ross presided, and Scruton was buried in Garsdon churchyard. Robert Jenrick, the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, said that the commission's work on building more beautifully, already submitted to his department, would proceed as part of an "unusually rich legacy".

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