Roger Scruton: life, ideas and books

Life

Roger Scruton was born in Buslingthorpe, Lincolnshire, in 1944. He taught at Birkbeck College, London, from 1971 to 1992, rising to Professor of Aesthetics, and later at Boston University and elsewhere. He founded and edited the conservative journal The Salisbury Review from 1982 to 2001, and he was a Fellow of the British Academy from 2008 and was knighted in 2016.

In the 1980s he helped organise underground teaching in Communist Czechoslovakia through the Jan Hus Educational Foundation, for which he later received the Czech Medal of Merit. In 2018 the British government appointed him to chair a commission on building beautiful housing; he was dismissed in April 2019 after a controversy over remarks and reappointed in July 2019. He died in London in January 2020.

Ideas

Scruton wrote on aesthetics, ethics, politics and sex, and his conservatism grew out of a view of what makes human life worth living. In The Meaning of Conservatism (1980) he argued for authority, allegiance and inherited institutions as conditions of freedom. He held that beauty and fitting architecture are central to a community's life and that people have a natural attachment to home, for which he used the word oikophilia and contrasted it with the repudiation of one's own culture, oikophobia.

He argued for moral education that includes the capacity to regard some actions as forbidden. In Sexual Desire (1986) he developed a philosophy of erotic life in which the other person is treated as an end in himself, and in Animal Rights and Wrongs (2000) he criticised utilitarian arguments while arguing for human obligations toward animals. In Thinkers of the New Left (1985) he criticised leading left-wing intellectuals.

Major works

• The Meaning of Conservatism (1980).
• The Aesthetics of Architecture (1979).
• Thinkers of the New Left (1985).
• Sexual Desire (1986).
• Beauty (2010).
• Green Philosophy (2011).
• How to Be a Conservative (2014).

Why conservatives read him

Scruton is read as a conservative who reached beyond economics to culture, art and the feeling of belonging. He wrote more than forty books and wrote with an elegance that appealed to readers outside the movement. His account of environmentalism as an extension of local loyalty, in Green Philosophy, gave many conservatives a way to talk about conservation without surrendering to central planning.

He drew on Edmund Burke and, in the American tradition, shared concerns with Russell Kirk about the loss of continuity and manners. Margaret Thatcher's government gave him some influence, though he was a critic of what he saw as the cultural effects of market liberalism. He was a controversial figure in Britain, and critics objected to some of his statements, but his work on beauty and home remains among the best-known statements of the thoughtful conservative temperament.