Sir Roger Scruton | |
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 Scruton in 2016 | |
| Born | Roger Vernon Scruton (1944-02-27)27 February 1944 Buslingthorpe, Lincolnshire, England |
| Died | 12 January 2020(2020-01-12) (aged 75) South Kensington, London, England |
| Alma mater | Jesus College, Cambridge (BA,MA,PhD)[1] |
| Occupations |
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| Notable work |
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| Television | Why Beauty Matters (BBC Two, 2009) |
| Spouses | |
| Children | 2 |
| Awards |
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Philosophy career | |
| Era | |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | |
Main interests | |
| Website | roger-scruton |
Sir Roger Vernon Scruton,FBA, FRSL (/ˈskruːtən/; 27 February 1944 – 12 January 2020) was an English philosopher, writer, and social critic who specialised inaesthetics andpolitical philosophy, particularly in the furtherance ofconservative views.[5][6][7] The founding-editor ofThe Salisbury Review, a conservative political journal, Scruton wrote over50 books on architecture, art, philosophy, politics, religion, among other topics. Scruton was also Chairman of theBuilding Better, Building Beautiful Commission for theUnited Kingdom's government, from 2019 to 2020. His views on classical architecture and beauty are still promoted via his foundation; while his political stances remain influential.
His publications includeThe Meaning of Conservatism (1980),Sexual Desire (1986),The Aesthetics of Music (1997), andHow to Be a Conservative (2014). He was a regular contributor to the popular media, includingThe Times,The Spectator, and theNew Statesman. Scruton explained that he embraced conservatism after witnessing theMay 1968 student protests in France.[8] From 1971 to 1992 he was lecturer, reader, and then Professor of Aesthetics atBirkbeck College,London, after which he was Professor of Philosophy atBoston University, from 1992 to 1995.[9] From then on, he worked as a freelance writer and scholar, though he later held several part-time or temporary academic positions, including in the United States.[10] In the 1980s he helped to establishunderground academic networks inSoviet-controlled Eastern Europe, for which he was awarded theCzech Republic'sMedal of Merit (First Class) by PresidentVáclav Havel in 1998.[11] Scruton wasknighted in the2016 Birthday Honours for "services to philosophy, teaching and public education".[12]
Roger Scruton was born inBuslingthorpe, Lincolnshire,[13] to John "Jack" Scruton, a teacher from Manchester, and his wife, Beryl Claris Scruton (née Haynes), and was raised with his two sisters inHigh Wycombe andMarlow.[14] The Scruton surname had been acquired relatively recently. Jack's father's birth certificate showed him as Matthew Lowe, after Matthew's mother, Margaret Lowe (Scruton's great-grandmother); the document made no mention of a father. However, Margaret Lowe had decided, for reasons unknown, to raise her son as Matthew Scruton instead. Scruton wondered whether she had been employed at the former Scruton Hall inScruton, Yorkshire, and whether that was where her child had been conceived.[15]
Jack was raised in aback-to-back on Upper Cyrus Street,Ancoats, an inner-city area of Manchester, and won a scholarship to Manchester High School, agrammar school.[16] Scruton toldThe Guardian that Jack hated the upper classes and loved the countryside, while Beryl entertained "blue-rinsed friends" and was fond of romantic fiction.[14] He described his mother as "cherishing an ideal of gentlemanly conduct and social distinction that ... [his] father set out with considerable relish to destroy".[17]
The Scrutons lived in apebbledashed semi-detached house in Hammersley Lane,High Wycombe.[14][18] Although his parents had been brought up as Christians, they regarded themselves as humanists, so home was a "religion-free zone".[19] Scruton's, indeed the whole family's, relationship with his father was difficult. He wrote inGentle Regrets (2005): "Friends come and go, hobbies and holidays dapple the soulscape like fleeting sunlight in a summer wind, and the hunger for affection is cut off at every point by the fear of judgement."[20]
After passing his11-plus, he attended theRoyal Grammar School High Wycombe from 1954 to 1962,[21][22] leaving with threeA-levels, in pure and applied Mathematics, Physics, and Chemistry, which he passed with distinction. The results won him an open scholarship in Natural Sciences toJesus College, Cambridge, as well as a state scholarship.[23] When he told his family he had won a place at Cambridge, his father stopped speaking to him.[24] Scruton writes that he was expelled from the school shortly afterwards when, during one of Scruton's plays, the headmaster found the school stage on fire and a half-naked girl putting out the flames.[14][25]
Having intended to studyNatural Sciences at Cambridge, where he felt "although socially estranged (like virtually every grammar-school boy), spiritually at home",[25] Scruton switched on the first day to Moral Sciences (Philosophy);[14] his supervisor wasA. C. Ewing.[26] He graduated with adouble first in 1965,[27] then spent time overseas, some of it teaching at theUniversity of Pau and Pays de l'Adour inPau, France, where he met his first wife, Danielle Laffitte.[28] He also lived in Rome.[29] His mother died around this time; she had been diagnosed withbreast cancer and had undergone amastectomy just before he went to Cambridge.[30]
In 1967, he began studying for his doctorate at Jesus College and then became a research fellow atPeterhouse, Cambridge (1969–1971), where he lived with Laffitte when she was not in France.[28] It was while visiting her during theMay 1968 student protests in France that Scruton first embracedconservatism. He was in theLatin Quarter in Paris, watching students overturn cars, smash windows and tear up cobblestones, and for the first time in his life "felt a surge of political anger":[31]
I suddenly realised I was on the other side. What I saw was an unruly mob of self-indulgent middle-class hooligans. When I asked my friends what they wanted, what were they trying to achieve, all I got back was this ludicrousMarxistgobbledegook. I was disgusted by it, and thought there must be a way back to the defence of western civilization against these things. That's when I became a conservative. I knew I wanted to conserve things rather than pull them down.[14]
Cambridge awarded Scruton hisPhD degree in January 1973 for a thesis titled "Art and imagination, a study in the philosophy of mind", supervised byElizabeth Anscombe.[32] The thesis was the basis of his first book,Art and Imagination (1974). From 1971 he taught philosophy atBirkbeck College, London, which specializes in adult education and holds its classes in the evening.[33] Meanwhile, Laffitte taught French atPutney High School, and the couple lived together in aHarley Street apartment previously occupied byDelia Smith.[34] They married in September 1973 at theBrompton Oratory, a Catholic church inKnightsbridge,[35] and divorced in 1979.[14] Scruton's second book,The Aesthetics of Architecture, was published that year.[36]
Scruton said he was the only conservative at Birkbeck, except for the woman who served meals in theSenior Common Room.[33] Working there left Scruton's days free, so he used the time to study law at theInns of Court School of Law (1974–1976) and wascalled to the Bar in 1978; he never practised because he was unable to take a year off work to complete apupillage.[21][37]
In 1974, along withHugh Fraser,Jonathan Aitken andJohn Casey, he became a founding member of theConservative Philosophy Group dining club, which aimed to develop an intellectual basis for conservatism.[38][39] The historianHugh Thomas and the philosopherAnthony Quinton attended meetings, as didMargaret Thatcher before she became prime minister. She reportedly said during one meeting in 1975: "The other side have got an ideology they can test their policies against. We must have one as well."[40]
According to Scruton, his academic career at Birkbeck was blighted by his conservatism, particularly by his third book,The Meaning of Conservatism (1980),[41][42] and later by his editorship of the conservativeSalisbury Review.[43] He toldThe Guardian that his colleagues at Birkbeck vilified him over the book.[24] The Marxist philosopherG. A. Cohen ofUniversity College London reportedly refused to teach a seminar with Scruton, although they later became friends.[44] He continued teaching at Birkbeck until 1992, first as a lecturer, by 1980 asreader, then, having been awarded achair in 1985, as Professor of Aesthetics.[45][46]
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In 1982 Scruton became founding editor ofThe Salisbury Review, a journal championing conservatism in opposition toThatcherism, which he edited until 2001.[47][48] TheReview was set up by a group of Tories known as the Salisbury Group – founded in 1978 byDiana Spearman andRobert Gascoyne-Cecil[5] – with the involvement of thePeterhouse Right. The latter were conservatives associated with the Cambridge college, includingMaurice Cowling,David Watkin and the mathematicianAdrian Mathias.[14][49][39] As of 1983 it had a circulation of under 1,000; according toMartin Walker, the circulation understated the journal's influence.[39]
Scruton wrote that editingThe Salisbury Review effectively ended his academic career in the United Kingdom. The magazine sought to provide an intellectual basis for conservatism, and was highly critical of key issues of the period, including the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, egalitarianism, feminism, foreign aid, multiculturalism and modernism.[50] In the first edition, he wrote: "It is necessary to establish a conservative dominance in intellectual life, not because this is the quickest or most certain way to political influence, but because in the long run, it is the only way to create a climate of opinion favourable to the conservative cause."[39] To begin with, Scruton had to write most of the articles himself, using pseudonyms: "I had to make it look as though there was something there in order thatthere should be something there!"[50] He believes that theReview "helped a new generation of conservative intellectuals to emerge. At last it was possible to be a conservative and also to theleft of something, to say 'Of course, theSalisbury Review is beyond the pale; but ...'"[51]
In 1984 theReview published a controversial article byRay Honeyford, a headmaster in Bradford, questioning the benefits of multicultural education.[52][53] Honeyford was forced to retire because of the article and had to live for a time under police protection.[54] TheBritish Association for the Advancement of Science accused theReview ofscientific racism, and theUniversity of Glasgow philosophy department boycotted a talk Scruton had been invited to deliver to its philosophy society. Scruton believed that the incidents made his position as a university professor untenable, although he also maintained that "it was worth sacrificing your chances of becoming a Fellow of theBritish Academy, a vice-chancellor or an emeritus professor for the sheer relief of uttering the truth."[47][55] (Scruton was in fact elected aFellow of the British Academy in 2008.)[56] In 2002 he described the effect of the editorship on his life:
It cost me many thousand hours of unpaid labour, a hideous character assassination inPrivate Eye, three lawsuits, two interrogations, one expulsion, the loss of a university career in Britain, unendingly contemptuous reviews, Tory suspicion, and the hatred of decent liberals everywhere. And it was worth it.[47]
The 1980s established Scruton as a prolific writer. Thirteen of his non-fiction works appeared between 1980 and 1989, as did his first novel,Fortnight's Anger (1981). The most contentious publication wasThinkers of the New Left (1985), a collection of his essays fromThe Salisbury Review, which criticized 14 prominent intellectuals, includingE. P. Thompson,Michel Foucault andJean-Paul Sartre.[a] According toThe Guardian, the book wasremaindered after being greeted with "derision and outrage". Scruton said he became very depressed by the criticism.[57] In 1987 he founded his own publisher, The Claridge Press, which he sold to theContinuum International Publishing Group in 2002.[b]
From 1983 to 1986 he wrote a weekly column forThe Times. Topics included music, wine and motorbike repair, but others were contentious. The features editor,Peter Stothard, said that there was no one he had ever commissioned "whose articles had provoked more rage".[60] Scruton made fun of anti-racism and the peace movement, and his support forMargaret Thatcher while she was prime minister was regarded, he wrote, as an "act of betrayal for a university teacher".[61] His first column, "Why politicians are all against real education", argued that universities were destroying education "by making it relevant": "Replace pure by applied mathematics, logic by computer programming, architecture by engineering, history by sociology. The result will be a new generation of well-informed philistines, whose charmlessness will undo every advantage which their learning might otherwise have conferred."[62]
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From 1979 to 1989, Scruton was an active supporter ofdissidents inCzechoslovakia underCommunist Party rule, forging links between the country's dissident academics and their counterparts in Western universities. As part of theJan Hus Educational Foundation,[63] he and other academics visitedPrague andBrno, now in theCzech Republic, in support of an underground education network started by the Czech dissidentJulius Tomin, smuggling in books, organizing lectures, and eventually arranging for students to study for a Cambridge external degree in theology (the only faculty that responded to the request for help). There were structured courses andsamizdat translations, books were printed, and people sat exams in a cellar with papers smuggled out through the diplomatic bag.[64][65]
Scruton was detained in 1985 in Brno before being expelled from the country. The Czech dissidentBronislava Müllerová watched him walk across the border with Austria: "There was this broad empty space between the two border posts, absolutely empty, not a single human being in sight except for one soldier, and across that broad empty space trudged an English philosopher, Roger Scruton, with his little bag into Austria."[66] On 17 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.[67]
For his work in supporting dissidents, Scruton was awarded the First of June Prize in 1993 by the Czech city ofPlzeň, and in 1998 he was awarded the Czech Republic'sMedal of Merit (First Class) by PresidentVáclav Havel.[67] In 2019 the Polish government awarded him theGrand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland.[68] Scruton was strongly critical of figures in the West – in particularEric Hobsbawm – who "chose to exonerate" the crimes and atrocities of former communist regimes.[69] His experience of dissident intellectual life in 1980s Communist Prague is recorded in fictional form in his novelNotes from Underground (2014).[70] He wrote in 2019 that "despite the appeal of the Poles, Hungarians, Romanians and many more, it is the shy, cynical Czechs to whom I lost my heart and from whom I have never retrieved it".[71]
Scruton took a year'ssabbatical from Birkbeck in 1990 and spent it working in Brno in the Czech Republic.[72] That year he registered Central European Consulting, established to offer business advice in post-communistCentral Europe.[73] He sold his apartment inNotting Hill Gate, and when he returned to England, he rented a cottage inStanton Fitzwarren, Swindon, from theMoonies, and an apartment inAlbany onPiccadilly, London, from the Conservative MPAlan Clark (it had been Clark'sservants' quarters).[14][72]
From 1992 to 1995, he lived inBoston,Massachusetts, teaching an elementary philosophy course and a graduate course on thephilosophy of music for one semester a year, as professor of philosophy atBoston University. Two of his books grew out of these courses:Modern Philosophy: A Survey (1994) andThe Aesthetics of Music (1997). In 1993 he bought Sundey Hill Farm[c] inBrinkworth, Wiltshire—35 acres later increased to 100, and a 250-year-old farmhouse – where he lived after returning from the United States.[76][57][77] He called it "Scrutopia".[57]
While in Boston, Scruton had flown back to England every weekend to indulge his passion forfox hunting,[78] and it was during a meet of theBeaufort Hunt that he met Sophie Jeffreys, an architectural historian.[14] They announced their engagement inThe Times in September 1996 (Jeffreys was described as "the youngest daughter of the late Lord Jeffreys and of Annie-Lou Lady Jeffreys"),[79] married later that year and set up home on Sunday Hill Farm.[80][14] Their two children were born in 1998 and 2000.[21] In 1999 they created Horsell's Farm Enterprises, a PR firm that includedJapan Tobacco International andSomerfield as clients.[73][81] Scruton and his publisher were sued forlibel that year by thePet Shop Boys for suggesting, in his bookAn Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture (1998), that their songs were in large part the work ofsound engineers; the group settled for undisclosed damages.[82]
Scruton was criticized in 2002 for having written articles aboutsmoking without disclosing that he was receiving a regular fee from Japan Tobacco International (JTI, formerlyR. J. Reynolds).[83] In 1999 he and his wife – as part of their consultancy work for Horsell's Farm Enterprises[73][84] – began producing a quarterly briefing paper,The Risk of Freedom Briefing (1999–2007), about the state's control of risk.[85] Distributed to journalists, the paper included discussions about drugs, alcohol and tobacco, and was sponsored by JTI.[84][86][87] Scruton wrote several articles in defence of smoking around this time, including one in 1998 forThe Times,[88] three for theWall Street Journal (two in 1998 and one in 2000),[89] one forCity Journal in 2001,[90] and a 65-page pamphlet for theInstitute of Economic Affairs,WHO, What, and Why: Trans-national Government, Legitimacy and the World Health Organisation (2000). The latter criticized theWorld Health Organization's campaign against smoking, arguing that transnational bodies should not seek to influence domestic legislation because they are not answerable to the electorate.[91]
The Guardian reported in 2002 that Scruton had been writing about these issues while failing to disclose that he was receiving £54,000 a year from JTI.[83] The payments came to light when a September 2001 email from the Scrutons to JTI was leaked toThe Guardian. Signed by Scruton's wife, the email asked the company to increase their £4,500 monthly fee to £5,500, in exchange for which Scruton would "aim to place an article every two months" in theWall Street Journal,Times,Telegraph,Spectator,Financial Times,Economist,Independent, orNew Statesman.[92][93][83] Scruton, who said the email had been stolen, replied that he had never concealed his connection with JTI.[84] In response toThe Guardian article, theFinancial Times ended his contract as a columnist,[94] TheWall Street Journal suspended his contributions,[95][96] and the Institute for Economic Affairs said it would introduce an author-declaration policy.[97]Chatto & Windus withdrew from negotiations for a book, and Birkbeck removed his visiting-professor privileges.[86]
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The tobacco controversy damaged Scruton's consultancy business in England. In part because of that, and because theHunting Act 2004 had banned fox hunting in England and Wales, the Scrutons considered moving to the United States permanently, and in 2004 they purchasedMontpelier, an 18th-centuryplantation house nearSperryville, Virginia.[99] Scruton set up a company, Montpelier Strategy LLC, to promote the house as a venue for weddings and similar events.[73] The couple lived there while retaining Sunday Hill Farm in England, but decided in 2009 against a permanent move to the United States and sold the house.[98] Scruton held two part-time academic positions during this period. From 2005 to 2009 he was research professor at theInstitute for the Psychological Sciences inArlington, Virginia, a graduate school ofDivine Mercy University; and in 2009 he worked at theAmerican Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., where he wrote his bookGreen Philosophy (2011).[100]
From 2001 to 2009 Scruton wrote a wine column for theNew Statesman, and contributed toThe World of Fine Wine andQuestions of Taste: The Philosophy of Wine (2007), with his essay "The Philosophy of Wine". His bookI Drink Therefore I Am: A Philosopher's Guide to Wine (2009)[101] in part comprises material from hisNew Statesman column.[102][103]
Scruton, who was largely self-taught as a composer, apart from some early guidance from his friendDavid Matthews, composed two operas setting his ownlibretti. The first is a one-act chamber piece,The Minister (1994),[104] and the second a two-act opera,Violet (2005). The latter, based on the life of the British harpsichordistViolet Gordon-Woodhouse, was performed twice at theGuildhall School of Music in London in 2005.[21] Scruton also composedThree Lorca Songs, which were performed in the Netherlands by soprano Kristina Bitenc and pianist Jeroen Sarphati in 2009, and he wrote the libretto toAnna, a two-act opera by David Matthews which premiered atThe Grange Festival on 14 July 2023.
The Scrutons returned from the United States to live at Sunday Hill Farm in Wiltshire, and Scruton took an unpaid research professorship at theUniversity of Buckingham.[21] In January 2010 he began an unpaid three-year visiting professorship at theUniversity of Oxford to teach graduate classes on aesthetics,[105] and was made a senior research fellow ofBlackfriars Hall, Oxford.[106] In 2010 he delivered the ScottishGifford Lectures at theUniversity of St Andrews on "The Face of God",[107] and from 2011 until 2014 he held a quarter-time professorial fellowship at St Andrews in moral philosophy.[108][27]
Two novels appeared during this period:Notes from Underground (2014) is based on his experiences in Czechoslovakia,[70] andThe Disappeared (2015) deals with child trafficking in a Yorkshire town.[109] Scruton wasknighted in the 2016 Birthday Honours for "services to philosophy, teaching and public education".[12] He sat on the editorial board of theBritish Journal of Aesthetics[110] and on the board of visitors ofRalston College, a new college proposed inSavannah, Georgia,[111] and was a senior fellow of theEthics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C.[112]
In November 2018,Communities SecretaryJames Brokenshire appointed Scruton as unpaid chair of the British government's Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission, established to promote better home design.[113]Labour andLiberal Democrat MPs objected because of remarks Scruton had made years earlier: he had described "Islamophobia" as a "propaganda word", homosexuality as "not normal", lesbianism as an attempt to find "committed love that [a woman] can't get from men any more", anddate rape as not a distinct crime. He had also made allegedly conspiratorial remarks about the Jewish businessmanGeorge Soros.[114]
In April 2019, an interview of Scruton byGeorge Eaton appeared in theNew Statesman. To publicise it, Eaton posted edited extracts from the interview onTwitter, of Scruton talking about Soros, Chinese people and Islam, among other topics, and referred to them as "a series of outrageous remarks".[115][116] Immediately after the interview and Eaton's posts went online, Scruton began to be criticised by various politicians and journalists; hours later, Brokenshire dismissed Scruton from the Commission.[117][118] When Scruton's dismissal was announced, Eaton posted a photograph of himself onInstagram drinking from a bottle of champagne, captioned, "The feeling when you get right-wing racist and homophobe Roger Scruton sacked as a Tory government adviser".[116] The next day, Scruton wrote inThe Spectator, "We in Britain are entering a dangerous social condition in which the direct expression of opinions that conflict – or merely seem to conflict – with a narrow set of orthodoxies is instantly punished by a band of self-appointed vigilantes."[119] On 12 April, Eaton apologised for his tweets and the Instagram post but otherwise stood by the interview, but would not release a full recording.[120]
On 25 April, Scruton's colleagueDouglas Murray, who had obtained a full recording of the interview, published details of it inThe Spectator, and wrote that Eaton had conducted a "hit job".[116][121][122] The audio suggested that both the tweets and Eaton's article had omitted relevant context. For example, Scruton had said: "Anybody who doesn't think that there's a Soros empire in Hungary has not observed the facts", but the article omitted: "it's not necessarily an empire of Jews; that's such nonsense."[123] Of the Chinese, Eaton tweeted that Scruton had said: "Each Chinese person is a kind of replica of the next one and that is a very frightening thing."[124] Eaton's article included more words: "They're creating robots out of their own people ... each Chinese person is a kind of replica ...."[117] The transcript showed the full sentence: "In a sense they're creating robots out of their own people by so constraining what can be done,"[125] which suggested the topic was theChinese Communist Party.[124] In response, theNew Statesman published the full transcript.[125]
On 2 May, theNew Statesman readers' editor,Peter Wilby, wrote that Eaton's online comments suggested that he had "approached the interview as a political activist, not as a journalist".[115] Two months later, theNew Statesman officially apologised.[123] Several days later, Brokenshire also apologised to Scruton.[115][126] Scruton was re-appointed a week later as co-chair of the commission.[127]
According toPaul Guyer, inA History of Modern Aesthetics: The Twentieth Century, "AfterWollheim, the most significant British aesthetician has been Roger Scruton."[128] Scruton was trained inanalytic philosophy, although he was drawn to other traditions. "I remain struck by the thin and withered countenance that philosophy quickly assumes," he wrote in 2012, "when it wanders away from art and literature, and I cannot open a journal likeMind orThe Philosophical Review without experiencing an immediate sinking of the heart, like opening a door into a morgue."[129]
He specialised inaesthetics throughout his career. From 1971 to 1992 he taught aesthetics at Birkbeck College. His PhD thesis formed the basis of his first book,Art and Imagination (1974), in which he argued that "what demarcates aesthetic interest from other sorts is that it involves the appreciation of something for its own sake".[130][131] He subsequently publishedThe Aesthetics of Architecture (1979),The Aesthetic Understanding (1983),The Aesthetics of Music (1997),[9] andBeauty (2010). In 2008 a two-day conference was held atDurham University to assess his impact in the field,[132] and in 2012 a collection of essays,Scruton's Aesthetics, edited by Andy Hamilton andNick Zangwill, was published by Palgrave Macmillan.[133]
In anIntelligence Squared debate in March 2009, Scruton (seconding historianDavid Starkey) proposed the motion: "Britain has become indifferent to beauty", and held an image ofBotticelli'sThe Birth of Venus next to one of the supermodelKate Moss.[134] Later that year he wrote and presented aBBC Two documentary,Why Beauty Matters, in which he argued that beauty should be restored to its traditional position in art, architecture and music.[135] He wrote that he had received "more than 500 e-mails from viewers, all but one saying, 'Thank Heavens someone is saying what needs to be said.'"[136] In 2018 he argued that a belief in God makes for more beautiful architecture:
Who can doubt, on visiting Venice, that this abundant flower of aesthetic endeavour was rooted in faith and watered by penitential tears? Surely, if we want to build settlements today we should heed the lesson of Venice. We should begin always with an act of consecration, since we thereby put down the real roots of a community.[137][138]
The philosopher of religion Christopher Hamilton described Scruton'sSexual Desire (1986) as "the most interesting and insightful philosophical account of sexual desire" produced withinanalytic philosophy.[139] The book influenced subsequent discussions of sexual ethics.[140][141][142]Martha Nussbaum (who had reviewed the work in 1986)[143] credited Scruton in 1995 with having provided "the most interesting philosophical attempt as yet to work through the moral issues involved in our treatment of persons as sex partners".[144][145]
According toJonathan Dollimore, Scruton based a conservative sexual ethic on the Hegelian proposition that "the final end of every rational being is the building of the self", which involves recognizing the other as an end in itself. Scruton argues that the major feature of perversion is "sexual release that avoids or abolishestheother", which he sees asnarcissistic andsolipsistic.[146] Nussbaum countered that Scruton did not apply his principle of otherness equally – for example, to sexual relationships between adults and children or between Protestants and Catholics.[147]
In an essay, "Sexual morality and the liberal consensus" (1990), Scruton wrote thathomosexuality leads to the "de-sanctifying of the human body" because the body of the homosexual's lover belongs to the same category as his own.[148] He further argued that gay people have no children and consequently no interest in creating a socially stable future. He therefore considered it justified to "instil in our children feelings of revulsion" towards homosexuality,[149] and in 2007 he challenged the idea that gay people should have the right to adopt.[150] Scruton toldThe Guardian in 2010 that he would no longer defend the view that revulsion against homosexuality can be justified.[24]
Scruton was anAnglican. His bookOur Church: A Personal History of the Church of England (2013) defended the relevance of theChurch of England.[151] He contends, followingImmanuel Kant, that human beings have a transcendental dimension, a sacred core exhibited in their capacity forself-reflection.[152] He argues that we are in an era of secularization without precedent in the history of the world; writers and artists such asRainer Maria Rilke,T. S. Eliot,Edward Hopper andArnold Schoenberg "devoted much energy to recuperating the experience of the sacred – but as a private rather than a public form of consciousness." Because these thinkers directed their art at the few, he writes, it has never appealed to the many.[153]
On the matter of evidence of God's existence, Scruton said: "Rational argument can get us just so far... It can help us to understand the real difference between a faith that commands us to forgive our enemies, and one that commands us to slaughter them. But the leap of faith itself – this placing of your life at God's service – is a leap over reason's edge. This does not make it irrational, any more than falling in love is irrational."[154] But despite claiming that belief alone is sufficiently rational, he advocated a form of theargument from beauty: he said that when we take the beauty in the natural world around us as a gift, we are able to openly understand God. The beauty speaks to us, he claims, and from it we can understand God's presence around us.[155]
Scruton considered that moral education should be "endarkening" as well as "enlightening", with "endarkening" being used as the inverse of "enlightening". "Endarkenment" is Scruton's way of describing the process of socialization through which certain behaviours and choices are closed off and forbidden to the subject, which he considers necessary to curb socially damaging impulses and behaviour:[149]
moral education cannot be ... purely enlightened and enlightening ... it cannot be simply a matter of teaching [people] to calculate the long term profit and the loss, while leaving .. desires to develop independently. It must involve an endarkened and endarkening component, by which [people] are taught precisely to cease [their] calculations, to regard certain paths as forbidden, as places where neither profit nor loss has authority.[156]
Scruton was best known for his writing in support of conservatism,[157][158] and his intellectual heroes wereEdmund Burke,Samuel Taylor Coleridge,Fyodor Dostoevsky,Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,John Ruskin, andT. S. Eliot.[159] His third book,The Meaning of Conservatism (1980) – which he called "a somewhat Hegelian defence of Tory values in the face of their betrayal by the free marketeers"[160] – was responsible, he said, for blighting his academic career.[24][161] He supportedMargaret Thatcher, while remaining sceptical of her view of the market as a solution to everything, but after theFalklands War, he thought that she "recognised that the self-identity of the country was at stake, and that its revival was a political task".[162]
Scruton wrote inGentle Regrets (2005) that he found several of Burke's arguments inReflections on the Revolution in France (1790) persuasive. Although Burke was writing about revolution, not socialism, Scruton was persuaded that, as he put it, the utopian promises of socialism are accompanied by an abstract vision of the mind that bears little relation to the way most people think. Burke also convinced him that there is no direction to history, no moral or spiritual progress; that people think collectively toward a common goal only during crises such as war, and that trying to organize society this way requires a real or imagined enemy; hence, Scruton wrote, the strident tone of socialist literature.[163]
Scruton further argued, following Burke, that society is held together by authority and therule of law, in the sense of the right to obedience, not by the imagined rights of citizens. Obedience, he wrote, is "the prime virtue of political beings, the disposition that makes it possible to govern them, and without which societies crumble into 'the dust and powder of individuality'". Real freedom does not stand in conflict with obedience, but is its other side.[163] He was also persuaded by Burke's arguments about thesocial contract, including that most parties to the contract are either dead or not yet born. To forget this, he wrote – to throw away customs and institutions – is to "place the present members of society in a dictatorial dominance over those who went before, and those who came after them".[164]
Beliefs that appear to be examples of prejudice may be useful and important, he wrote: "our most necessary beliefs may be both unjustified and unjustifiable, from our own perspective, and the attempt to justify them will merely lead to their loss." A prejudice in favour ofmodesty in women andchivalry in men, for example, may aid the stability of sexual relationships and the raising of children, although these are not offered as reasons in support of the prejudice. It may therefore be easy to show the prejudice as irrational, but there will be a loss nonetheless if it is discarded.[165]
InArguments for Conservatism (2006), Scruton marked out the areas in which philosophical thinking is required if conservatism is to be intellectually persuasive. He argued that human beings are creatures of limited and local affections. Territorial loyalty is at the root of all forms of government where law and liberty reign supreme; every expansion of jurisdiction beyond the frontiers of the nation state leads to a decline in accountability.[166]
He opposed elevating the "nation" above its people, which would threaten rather than facilitate citizenship and peace. "Conservatism and conservation" are two aspects of a single policy, that of husbanding resources, including thesocial capital embodied in laws, customs and institutions, and the material capital contained in the environment. He argued further that the law should not be used as a weapon to advance special interests. People impatient for reform – for example in the areas ofeuthanasia orabortion – are reluctant to accept what may be "glaringly obvious to others – that the law exists precisely to impede their ambitions".[167]
Scruton definespost-modernism as the claim that there are no grounds for truth, objectivity, and meaning, and that conflicts between views are therefore nothing more than contests of power. Scruton argued that, while the West is required to judge other cultures in their own terms, Western culture is adversely judged as ethnocentric and racist. He wrote: "The very reasoning which sets out to destroy the ideas of objective truth and absolute value imposes political correctness as absolutely binding, and cultural relativism as objectively true."[168]
Scruton was critical of the contemporaryfeminist movement, while reserving praise for suffragists such asMary Wollstonecraft.[24] However, he praisedGermaine Greer in 2016, saying that she had "cast an awful lot of light on our literary tradition" by showing the male as the dominant figure, and defended her against criticism for having used the word "sex" to describe the difference between men and women, rather than "gender", which Scruton called "politically correct".[169]
Scruton was a supporter ofconstitutional monarchy, arguing it is "the light above politics, which shines down on the human bustle from a calmer and more exalted sphere."[170] In a 1991 column for theLos Angeles Times, he argued that monarchy helped create peace in Central Europe and it was "the loss of it that precipitated 70 years of conflict on the Continent."[171]
Scruton definedtotalitarianism as the absence of any constraint on central authority, with every aspect of life the concern of government. Advocates of totalitarianism feed on resentment, Scruton argues, and having seized power they proceed to abolish institutions – such as the law, property, and religion – that create authorities: "To the resentful it is these institutions that are the cause of inequality, and therefore the cause of their humiliations and failures." He argues that revolutions are not conducted from below by the people, but from above, in the name of the people, by an aspiring elite.[153]
The importance ofNewspeak in totalitarian societies, he writes, is that the power of language to describe reality is replaced by language whose purpose is to avoid encounters with realities. He agrees withAlain Besançon that the totalitarian society envisaged byGeorge Orwell inNineteen Eighty-Four (1949) can be only understood in theological terms, as a society founded on a transcendental negation. In accordance withT. S. Eliot, Scruton believes that true originality is only possible within a tradition, and that it is precisely in modern conditions – conditions of fragmentation, heresy, and unbelief – that the conservative project acquires its sense.[172]
In 2014, Scruton said he supportedEnglish independence because he believed it would uphold friendship betweenEngland,Scotland,Wales, andNorthern Ireland, and because the English would have a say in all matters.[173] In 2019, when asked if he believed in English independence, he told theNew Statesman:
No, I don't think I've ever really favoured English independence. My view is that if the Scots want to be independent then we should aim for the same thing ... I don't think the Welsh want independence, the Northern Irish certainly don't. The Scottish desire for independence is, to some extent, a fabrication. They want to identify themselves as Scots but still ... enjoy the subsidy they get from being part of the kingdom. I can see there are Scottish nationalists who envision something more than that, but if that becomes a real political force then yeah, we should try for independence too. As it is, as you know, the Scots have two votes: they can vote for their own parliament and vote to put their people into our parliament, who come to our parliament with no interest in Scotland but an interest in bullying us.[125]
Scruton strongly supportedBrexit, because he believed that theEuropean Union is a threat to the sovereignty of the United Kingdom and that Brexit will help retain national identity, which he saw as under threat as a result of mass immigration, and because he opposed theCommon Agricultural Policy. He also opposed the metrification of weights and measures and believed it was an 'affront to the British people, its history and its long established patterns of trade'.[174][175][176][177][178][179]
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For his work with theJan Hus Educational Foundation in communistCzechoslovakia, Scruton was awarded the First of June Prize in 1993 by the Czech city ofPlzeň. In 1998Václav Havel, president of theCzech Republic, presented him with theMedal of Merit (First Class).[67] In the UK, he wasknighted in the2016 Birthday Honours for "services to philosophy, teaching and public education".[12] His family accompanied him to the ceremony, which was performed byPrince Charles atBuckingham Palace.[180] In 2016 theEuropean University of Tirana awarded him with Doctor Honoris Causa.[181]
Polish PresidentAndrzej Duda presented Scruton with theGrand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland in June 2019 "for supporting the democratic transformation in Poland".[68][182] In November that year, the Senate of the Czech Parliament awarded him a Silver Medal for his work in support of Czech dissidents.[183] The next month, during a ceremony in London, Hungarian Prime MinisterViktor Orbán presented him with theHungarian Order of Merit, Commander's Cross with Star.[184][185]
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1998: First Class of the Medal of Merit of the Czech Republic
2015: Knight Bachelor
2019: First Class of the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland_2class_BAR.svg)
2019: Commander's Cross with Star of the Hungarian Order of MeritAfter learning in July 2019 that he hadlung cancer, Scruton underwent treatment, includingchemotherapy.[71][186] He died atCromwell Hospital in London on 12 January 2020, at the age of 75.[186][187] The next day, Prime MinisterBoris Johnson tweeted: "We have lost the greatest modern conservative thinker – who not only had the guts to say what he thought but said it beautifully."[188][189] TheChancellor of the Exchequer,Sajid Javid, referred to Scruton's work behind the Iron Curtain: "From his support for freedom fighters in Eastern Europe to his immense intellectual contribution to conservatism in the West, he made a unique contribution to public life."[188]
Mario Vargas Llosa, a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote: "[Scruton] was one of the most educated people I have ever met. He could speak of music, literature, archaeology, wine, philosophy, Greece, Rome, the Bible and a thousand subjects more than an expert, although he was not an expert on anything, because, in fact, he was a humanist in the classical style ... Scruton's departure leaves a dreadful void around us."[190]
Conservative MEPDaniel Hannan called Scruton "the greatest conservative of our age", adding: "The country has lost a towering intellect. I have lost a wonderful friend."Robert Jenrick, the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, said that Scruton's work on "building more beautifully, submitted recently to my department, will proceed and stand part of his unusually rich legacy".[191] The scholar and former politicianAyaan Hirsi Ali described him as a "dear and generous friend, who gave freely to those who sought advice and wisdom, and he expected little in return".[192] Another friend and colleague,Douglas Murray, paid tribute to Scruton's personal kindness, calling him "one of the kindest, most encouraging, thoughtful, and generous people you could ever have known".[193] Others who paid tribute to Scruton included education reformerKatharine Birbalsingh[194] and cabinet ministerMichael Gove, who called Scruton "an intellectual giant, a brilliantly clear and compelling writer".[195]
In an essay critical of Scruton's philosophy of aesthetics, "The Art of Madness and Mystery", published inChurch Life (a journal of theUniversity of Notre Dame's McGrath Institute) shortly after Scruton's death, Michael Shindler wrote that "like the Roman guard who would not abandon his post during the cataclysm of Pompeii, the late Roger Scruton stands in lonesome majesty as the artistic tradition's greatest defender athwart modernity's aesthetic upheaval."[196]
Scruton's funeral was held on 24 January 2020 atMalmesbury Abbey with the attendance of several peers, Conservative politicians, and Hungarian Prime MinisterViktor Orbán. After the ceremony, which was presided by the Reverend Oliver Ross, Scruton's remains were buried in Garsdon churchyard.[197]
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"The 2016 Queen's Birthday Honours List"(PDF).Gov.uk. 10 June 2016.
Halstead, Mark (1988).Education, Justice, and Cultural Diversity: An Examination of the Honeyford Affair, 1984–85. Barcombe: Falmer Press.
Scruton, Roger (7 January 2000)."The Risks of being Risk-free".The Wall Street Journal.
"2010 Gifford lectures", University of St Andrews Gifford Lectures.
Moore, Rowan (25 November 2018)."Would you trust Roger Scruton to design your new home?".The Guardian.
"Academic Scruton sacked from housing role".BBC News. 10 April 2019.
Dreher, Rod (16 November 2019)."Roger Scruton In His Glory".The American Conservative.
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