Roger Scruton Made the Love of Home a Serious Political Philosophy

The most radical thing a modern philosopher can say is that he loves the village he lives in. Say you love humanity and you get a grant. Say you love your nation and you get a lecture. Say you love the particular hedgerows, parish church and pub at the end of your lane, and that this love is the foundation of political order, and the faculty lounge will look at you as if you had brought a cow to a seminar.

Roger Scruton said it anyway, for about fifty years, with more learning and better prose than most of his critics. He is the reason a serious person can now argue that conservatism begins not with tax rates or abstract liberty, but with home. Here is who he was, what he argued, and why his idea answers two opponents at once.

Define the term first

Scruton's key word is oikophilia, from the Greek oikos, meaning household or home, and philia, meaning love or friendship. It means the love of home: of the place where you live, the people who share it, the customs, buildings and landscapes that make it yours. It is not a feeling about the planet or about a race. It is attachment to somewhere in particular, shared with particular neighbors.

He paired it with its opposite, oikophobia, a word he gave this meaning, the repudiation of one's own inheritance: the habit, common among educated elites, of treating one's own country's traditions as uniquely shameful while treating every other culture's as uniquely precious.

Two definitions, and already you can see the argument coming.

A life in three scenes

Paris, 1968

Scruton was born in England in 1944 and studied philosophy at Cambridge. In May 1968 he was in Paris, in the Latin Quarter, when students rose up, tore up the paving stones and declared war on bourgeois society. Many young intellectuals of his generation took that spring as a conversion experience toward the left. It converted Scruton the other way. He looked at the crowds smashing the street and concluded, as he later explained in several essays, that he wanted to conserve what they were trying to destroy. The students had slogans for everything and a defense of nothing.

That is a useful origin story because it is not a story about economics. Scruton did not become a conservative because he read a tax chart. He became one because he saw an inheritance under attack by people who could not say what they would build in its place.

Prague, the 1980s

The second scene is braver. From the late 1970s Scruton travelled to communist Czechoslovakia to teach in underground seminars. After the Prague Spring was crushed in 1968, the regime purged universities and barred dissident scholars from teaching. Philosophers who had lost their posts worked as stokers and window washers, and they held classes in private apartments. Scruton and colleagues from Britain and elsewhere smuggled in books and lectured in those rooms, and they helped set up a foundation to support the effort.

This was not tourism. The secret police watched these seminars, and in 1985 Scruton was detained and expelled from the country. After the fall of communism, President Václav Havel awarded him the Czech Medal of Merit in 1998.

What did he learn there? That ordinary people living under a regime that had abolished civil society would rebuild it in their kitchens. The seminars were little platoons, in Burke's phrase, formed by people who had lost every public institution and refused to lose their culture. Scruton saw that the love of home and of an inheritance could outlast a police state.

Wiltshire, and a knighthood

The third scene is quieter. Scruton spent much of his later life on a farm in Wiltshire, writing books, keeping animals and arguing in public. He taught at Birkbeck College in London from 1971 to 1992 and founded and edited The Salisbury Review, a conservative quarterly, from 1982. He was knighted in 2016 for services to philosophy, teaching and public education. He died in January 2020.

The books, briefly

A full list would run to dozens of titles, so here are the ones that carry the argument.

• The Meaning of Conservatism (1980): his early statement that conservatism is about authority, allegiance and institutions, not merely free markets.
• Thinkers of the New Left (1985), later expanded as Fools, Frauds and Firebrands (2015): a critique of the major thinkers of the academic left. The first version damaged his standing in the academy, which tells you something about the academic tolerance of dissent.
• England: An Elegy (2000): a portrait of the English institutions and customs he thought were being dismantled.
• Beauty (2009), along with a BBC documentary that year called Why Beauty Matters: the case that beauty is a real value, not a matter of taste, and that its loss in architecture and art is a moral loss.
• Green Philosophy (2012), published in America as How to Think Seriously About the Planet: the book where oikophilia does its heaviest work.
• How to Be a Conservative (2014): the most accessible summary of his view.

He also chaired a British government commission on the design of new housing from 2018, which was a fitting final public job. A man who spent decades arguing that ugly buildings make for unhappy neighborhoods was finally asked his opinion by people who build them.

The argument for home, in numbered steps

Scruton's case can be put as a chain.

1. Human beings are settlers. We do not live as abstract individuals. We live somewhere, among people we did not choose, in buildings and customs we inherited.
2. Political order needs a "we." Laws bind strangers only if they think of themselves as members of something together. Scruton called this the first-person plural: the pre-political sense of belonging that lets people accept a law they voted against, because it was made by "us."
3. That "we" grows from attachment to a place. It does not come from a contract or a creed alone. It comes from a shared home: territory, language, history and memory.
4. Oikophilia is therefore the root of a stable free society. People who love their home will sacrifice for it, maintain it, obey its laws and defend its institutions.
5. Conservatism is the politics that protects oikophilia. It defends the institutions, customs and landscapes that make a home worth loving, and it resists the forces, whether market or state, that would dissolve them.

Notice step five. It is not anti-market. Scruton defended private property and enterprise. But he insisted that markets are not the foundation. They rest on trust, law and settled communities, and a conservatism that talks only about markets has forgotten what the markets are for.

Why conserving nature is a conservative cause

This is where Scruton surprised people. Green Philosophy argued that environmental protection belongs naturally to the right, not the left.

His reasoning ran like this. The environmental problems people actually solve are local: the stream, the woodland, the field, the town square. They are solved by people who care about a particular place because it is theirs and their children's. Love of home is the motive that makes people clean up after themselves and plant trees they will never sit under.

By contrast, he argued, the left's environmentalism tends to move problems up to the most distant possible level, to international treaties and centralized agencies, where nobody feels responsible and the cost falls on people who have no say. The bureaucrat in a distant capital does not love your river. You do.

There is a conservative joke in this somewhere: the people most eager to save the planet are often the people least able to name the birds in their own backyard. Scruton would have put it more politely. His point was that stewardship is a habit of the heart before it is a regulation, and that habits of the heart form at home. Burke's description of society as a partnership between the living, the dead and those who are yet to be born is, read one way, the oldest environmental principle in political philosophy.

The two opponents oikophilia answers

The angle that makes Scruton useful now is that his idea of home answers two very different camps.

The globalist

The first opponent says that national and local loyalties are obsolete. We are citizens of the world. Borders are arbitrary lines. Decisions should be made by experts in international institutions, and attachment to a particular country is at best sentimental and at worst dangerous.

Scruton's answer: there is no such thing as a citizen of the world, because the world has no government that can command loyalty and no home that can be loved. Universal benevolence is a fine sentiment and a useless political foundation. Institutions that govern people who feel no "we" with each other have no legitimacy except force and paperwork. That is why the more power moves away from the places people live, the less they trust it. Oikophobia, the reflexive contempt for one's own inheritance, is not cosmopolitan sophistication. It is a failure of gratitude, and a free society cannot run on ingratitude, as Gratitude Is a Conservative Virtue, and Ingratitude Fuels Every Revolution argues.

The angry nationalist

The second opponent is on the right. He says the nation is everything, defined by blood or by grievance, and that politics is the struggle of our people against theirs.

Scruton's answer to him is just as firm. Oikophilia is love of a home, not hatred of other homes. It is territorial and civic, not racial. The nation he defended was a community of people who share a place and its laws and who can welcome newcomers who come to share them too. He distinguished national loyalty, which he thought necessary, from nationalism as an ideology, which he thought could become as abstract and destructive as any utopian creed. The man who loves his village does not need an enemy to love it. A politics that runs on resentment has stopped being about home and become about the enemy.

That balance is rare. Most political philosophies pick one of these opponents and become the other. Scruton offered a love of country that is particular without being tribal, and settled without being closed.

The strongest objection, answered

Put the critique at full strength.

Love of home is exclusionary by nature. Every "we" implies a "they." Appeals to settled communities and traditional landscapes have historically been used to keep outsiders out and to defend unjust hierarchies. And in a mobile, diverse society, many people do not have a single home to love. Scruton's philosophy is the nostalgia of a man who owned a farm, dressed up as political theory.

Here is the answer, in three points.

1. Every political order has a "we." The question is not whether to have one but what kind. A civic "we," defined by shared territory, law and allegiance, can be joined. A "we" defined by ideology or ancestry cannot be joined, or can be joined only by surrender. Scruton's version is the open one.
2. Mobility makes home more important, not less. People who move still settle. A family that arrives in a new town joins a church, coaches a team and votes in school board elections. Oikophilia is not the privilege of the landed. It is the instinct that turns arrivals into neighbors, and it is what immigrants are pursuing when they put down roots.
3. The alternative is worse. If not home, then what holds a free people together? A procedural contract no one remembers signing? Loyalty to a party? Consumption? Each of these is thinner than attachment to a place, and the twentieth century showed what happens when people with no settled loyalties are offered a cause instead.

The objection is right that love of home can sour. It is wrong that the cure is to stop loving home.

What Americans should take from an Englishman

Scruton was deeply English. His examples were hedgerows, parish churches and fox hunts. Americans could be forgiven for thinking he has little to say to a country of suburbs, interstates and people who move every few years.

But the American Founding was built on oikophilia before anyone named it. The colonists who resisted Parliament were defending local self-government in their own assemblies and town meetings. Federalism is the constitutional form of the idea that people govern best what they know and love closest to home. Tocqueville saw that Americans learned liberty in their townships, and our own The Little Platoons Passage From 1790 and What It Asks of Us Now makes the case that the small associations are where public affection begins.

Conservatives who want to make Scruton's case here can start simple. Defend the institutions that make a place a home: the church, the school board, the volunteer fire company, the local paper. Fight for beautiful public buildings and against the idea that ugliness is the price of progress. Treat the love of country as a natural extension of the love of one's town, not a substitute for it. Read Oakeshott Said Being Conservative Is a Temperament Before It Is a Program and Chesterton Called Tradition the Democracy of the Dead, and He Was Right for two more English voices making the same point in different keys, and Robert Nisbet Saw Lonely People Turn to the State for Belonging for the American sociologist who saw what happens when the local institutions wither and the state offers itself as the replacement.

And when someone tells you that loving your home is parochial, remember that the man who said otherwise risked arrest to teach philosophy in a stranger's apartment in Prague. He knew what a home was worth because he had seen people rebuild one under a police state.

The case in brief

1. Roger Scruton (1944 to 2020) turned from the Paris uprising of May 1968 toward conservatism, taught in underground seminars in communist Czechoslovakia until his expulsion in 1985, and was knighted in 2016.
2. His central idea, oikophilia, holds that love of a particular home, its people, places and customs, is the pre-political loyalty that makes self-government and the rule of law possible.
3. He argued that conserving nature is a conservative cause, because stewardship grows from local attachment rather than from distant agencies.
4. Oikophilia answers the globalist, who has no home to offer, and the angry nationalist, who has replaced love of home with hatred of others.
5. Americans already live this idea through federalism, local institutions and the civic, joinable nation the Founders built.

What you can do: attend one meeting of your town council or planning board this season and speak up for a local building, park or institution worth keeping.