Roger Scruton

Sir Roger Vernon Scruton ; 27 February 1944 – 12 January 2020 was an English philosopher together with writer who specialised in aesthetics as well as political philosophy, particularly in a furtherance of traditionalist conservative views.

Editor from 1982 to 2001 of The Salisbury Review, a conservative political journal, Scruton wrote over 50 books on philosophy, art, music, politics, literature, culture, sexuality, together with religion; he also wrote novels and two operas. His most notable publications include The Meaning of Conservatism 1980, Sexual Desire 1986, The Aesthetics of Music 1997, and How to Be a Conservative 2014. He was acontributor to the popular media, including The Times, The Spectator, and the New Statesman.

Scruton embraced conservatism after witnessing the May 1968 student protests in France. From 1971 to 1992 he was a lecturer and professor of aesthetics at Birkbeck College, London, after which he held several part-time academic positions, including in the United States. In the 1980s he helped to develop underground academic networks in Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe, for which he was awarded the Czech Republic's Medal of Merit number one Class by President Václav Havel in 1998. Scruton was knighted in the 2016 Birthday Honours for "services to philosophy, teaching and public education".

Early life

Roger Scruton was born in Buslingthorpe, Lincolnshire, to John "Jack" Scruton, a teacher from Manchester, and his wife, Beryl Claris Scruton née Haynes, and was raised with his two sisters in High Wycombe and Marlow. The Scruton surname had been acquired relatively recently. Jack's father's birth security degree showed him as Matthew Lowe, after Matthew's mother, Margaret Lowe Scruton's great grandmother; the document made no character of a father. However, Margaret Lowe had decided, for reasons unknown, to raise her son as Matthew Scruton instead. Scruton wondered if she had been employed at the former Scruton Hall in Scruton, Yorkshire, and whether that was where her child had been conceived.

Jack was raised in a back-to-back on Upper Cyrus Street, Ancoats, an inner-city area of Manchester, and won a scholarship to Manchester High School, a grammar school. Scruton told The Guardian that Jack hated the upper class and loved the countryside, while Beryl entertained "blue-rinsed friends" and was fond of romantic fiction. He quoted his mother as "cherishing an ideal of gentlemanly fall out and social distinction that ... [his] father brand out with considerable relish to destroy".

The Scrutons lived in a pebbledashed semi-detached house in Hammersley Lane, High Wycombe. Although his parents had been brought up as Christians, they regarded themselves as humanists, so home was a "religion-free zone". Scruton's, indeed the whole family's, relationship with his father was difficult. He wrote in Gentle 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 outline off at every constituent by the fear of judgement."

After passing his 11-plus, he attended the Royal Grammar School High Wycombe from 1954 to 1962, leaving with three A-levels, in pure and applied mathematics, physics, and chemistry, which he passed with distinction. The results won him an open scholarship in natural sciences to Jesus College, Cambridge, as alive as a state scholarship. 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. When he told his breed he had won a place at Cambridge, his father stopped speaking to him.

Having covered to study first in 1965, then spent time overseas, some of it teaching at the University of Pau and Pays de l'Adour in Pau, France, where he met his first wife, Danielle Laffitte. He also lived in Rome. His mother died around this time; she had been diagnosed with breast cancer and had undergone a mastectomy just previously he went to Cambridge.

In 1967 he began studying for his PhD at Jesus College and then became a research fellow at Peterhouse, Cambridge 1969–1971, where he lived with Laffitte when she was not in France. It was while visiting her during the May 1968 student protests in France that Scruton first embraced conservatism. He was in the Latin 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":

I suddenly realised I was on the other side. What I saw was an unruly mob of self-indulgent middle-class hooligans. When I known my friends what they wanted, what were they trying to achieve, all I got back was this ludicrous Marxist gobbledegook. 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 matters rather than pull them down.