Sir Roger Vernon Scruton (; 27 February 194412 January 2020) was an English philosopher, writer, and social critic who specialised in aesthetics and political philosophy, particularly in the furtherance of conservative views. The founding-editor of The Salisbury Review, a conservative political journal, Scruton wrote over 50 books on architecture, art, philosophy, politics, religion, among other topics. Scruton was also Chairman of the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission for the United Kingdom government from 2019 to 2020. His views on classical architecture and beauty are still promoted via his foundation, while his political stances remain influential.
Scruton's publications include The Meaning of Conservatism (1980), (1986), The Aesthetics of Music (1997), and How to Be a Conservative (2014). He was a regular contributor to the popular media, including The Times, The Spectator, and the New Statesman. Scruton explained that he embraced conservatism after witnessing the May 1968 student protests in France. From 1971 to 1992 he was lecturer, reader, and then Professor of Aesthetics at Birkbeck College, London, after which he was Professor of Philosophy at Boston University until 1995.
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. In the 1980s he helped establish underground academic networks in Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe, for which he was awarded the Czech Republic's Medal of Merit (First 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 Family background 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 was acquired relatively recently. His paternal grandfather's birth certificate recorded his name as Matthew Lowe, after Matthew's mother, Margaret Lowe (Scruton's great-grandmother); the document made no mention of a father. However, Margaret Lowe decided, for reasons unknown, to raise her son as Matthew Scruton instead. Scruton wondered whether she was employed at the former Scruton Hall in Scruton, Yorkshire, and whether it was where her children were conceived.Scruton, Roger (2001). England: An Elegy. London: Pimlico, 139–140.
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.England: An Elegy, 141. Jack's father was a labourer, and a heavy drinker; he had forced Jack to leave school at the age of 14 and work as a labourer even though Jack was a bright student. After the end of World War I, Jack joined a teacher training school and became a school master. As a result, Jack became an avowed socialist, one who believed the Anglo-Saxon working class had liberated themselves from the Anglo-Norman aristocracy.
Jack banned the siblings from reading Beatrix Potter's books because she was bourgeois and "polluted the beauty of the countryside and their wild Saxon inheritance". Scruton told The Guardian his father hated the upper classes and adored the English countryside and trade unions, while his mother entertained "blue-rinsed friends" and was fond of romantic fiction. He described his mother as "cherishing an ideal of gentlemanly conduct and social distinction that ... [his] father set out with considerable relish to destroy".
Education
The Scrutons lived in a pebbledashed semi-detached house in Hammersley Lane, High Wycombe.Gentle Regrets, 89. Although his parents were brought up as Christians, they regarded themselves as humanists, so home was a "religion-free zone".Scruton, Roger (March 2009). "The New Humanism". The American Spectator. Scruton and his 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 cut off at every point by the fear of judgement."Gentle Regrets, 94. Scruton inherited from his father a preference for local architecture, the necessity of home and settling down, and a dislike of change and modernism. As a teenager, Scruton was also influenced by Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West series, particularly by its "resistance to enlightenment and belief in the necessity of culture and the fact of its decline".
After passing his 11-plus, he attended the Royal Grammar School High Wycombe from 1954 to 1962,England: An Elegy, 25. 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 well as a state scholarship. When he told his family he had won a place at Cambridge, his father stopped speaking to him. When Scruton was caught riding on the London Underground without a ticket, he told the police his name was John Stuart Mill.
Scruton says 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.Gentle Regrets, 34. During his gap year, Scruton initially washed dishes at a Lyons corner shop on Mile End Road, then hitchhiked through Greece and Egypt to Lebanon, where he witnessed the Lebanese Civil War and learned Arabic.
Having intended to study Natural Sciences at Cambridge, where he felt "although socially estranged (like virtually every grammar-school boy), spiritually at home", Scruton switched on the first day to Moral Sciences (Philosophy); his supervisor was A. C. Ewing.Scruton, Roger (2012). "Working toward Art". In Hamilton, Andy; Zangwill, Nick (eds.). Scruton's Aesthetics. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1. The college then had a rule prohibiting women from visiting a student's room; when his girlfriend's clothes were found by his tutor, Scruton escaped punishment by claiming he wore the clothes and was a transvestite. He graduated with a double 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."Working toward Art", Scruton's Aesthetics, 2. His mother died around this time; she was diagnosed with breast cancer and had undergone a mastectomy just before he went to Cambridge.Gentle Regrets, 104ff.
In 1967, he began studying for his doctorate 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 when 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":Gentle Regrets, 37.
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 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 things rather than pull them down.
1970s–1980s Birkbeck, first marriage
Cambridge awarded Scruton his PhD degree in January 1973 for a thesis titled "Art and imagination, a study in the philosophy of mind", supervised by Elizabeth Anscombe and Michael Tanner. The thesis was the basis of his first book, Art and Imagination (1974). From 1971 he taught philosophy at Birkbeck College, London, which specializes in adult education and holds its classes in the evening. Meanwhile, Laffitte taught French at Putney High School, and the couple lived together in a Harley Street apartment previously occupied by Delia Smith. They married in September 1973 at the Brompton Oratory, a Catholic church in Knightsbridge,"Marriages". The Times. 1 October 1973, issue 58901, 19. and divorced in 1979. Scruton's second book, The Aesthetics of Architecture, was published that year.
Scruton said he was the only conservative at Birkbeck, except for the woman who served meals in the Senior Common Room.Gentle Regrets, 39. Working there left Scruton's days free, so he used the time to study law at the Inns of Court School of Law (1974–1976) and was called to the Bar in 1978; he never practised because he was unable to take a year off work to complete a pupillage.Gentle Regrets, 57; .
In 1974, along with Tory politicians Hugh Fraser and Jonathan Aitken and professor John Casey, he became a founding member of the Conservative Philosophy Group (CPG) dining club, which aimed to develop an intellectual basis for conservatism.Gentle Regrets, 45; . Historian Hugh Thomas and philosopher Anthony Quinton attended meetings, as did Margaret 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." Other notable people who attended CPG sessions include Syed Kamall, Enoch Powell, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and Michael Oakeshott. Scruton also invited the poet Michael Schmidt to join the CPG. Though Schmidt declined, he published Scruton's essays in his P. N. Review and Carcanet Press imprints, and also introduced Scruton to the writers C. H. Sisson and Donald Davie.
According to Scruton, his academic career at Birkbeck was blighted by his conservatism, particularly by his third book, The Meaning of Conservatism (1980),Scruton, Roger (1980). The Meaning of Conservatism. London: The Macmillan Press. and later by his editorship of the conservative Salisbury Review.Gentle Regrets, 51; . He told The Guardian his colleagues at Birkbeck vilified him over the book. The Marxist philosopher G. A. Cohen of University College London reportedly refused to teach a seminar with Scruton, although they later became friends.. He continued teaching at Birkbeck until 1992, first as a lecturer, by 1980 as reader, then, having been awarded a chair in 1985, as Professor of Aesthetics.
The Salisbury Review
In 1982 Scruton became founding editor of The Salisbury Review, a journal championing conservatism in opposition to Thatcherism, which he edited until 2001.Scruton, Roger (1988). Conservative Thoughts: Essays from the Salisbury Review. London: The Claridge Press. The Review was set up by a group of Tories known as the Salisbury Groupfounded in 1978 by Diana Spearman and Robert Gascoyne-Cecilwith the involvement of the Peterhouse Right. The latter were conservatives associated with the Cambridge college, including Maurice Cowling, David Watkin and mathematician Adrian Mathias.For the Peterhouse Right (he calls it the Peterhouse Group) and The Salisbury Review, see Haseler, Stephen (1989). The battle for Britain: Thatcher and the New Liberals. London: I.B. Tauris, 138; Gentle Regrets, 51. As of 1983 it had a circulation of under 1,000; according to Martin Walker, the circulation understated the journal's influence.