63 Facts About Roger Scruton

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.

Roger Scruton was Chairman of the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission for the United Kingdom's government, from 2019 to 2020.

Roger Scruton was a regular contributor to the popular media, including The Times, The Spectator, and the New Statesman.

Roger Scruton explained that he embraced conservatism after witnessing the May 1968 student protests in France.

Roger Scruton was knighted in the 2016 Birthday Honours for "services to philosophy, teaching and public education".

Roger Scruton was born in Buslingthorpe, Lincolnshire, to John "Jack" Scruton, a teacher from Manchester, and his wife, Beryl Claris Scruton, and was raised with his two sisters in High Wycombe and Marlow.

Roger Scruton told The Guardian that Jack hated the upper classes and loved the countryside, while Beryl entertained "blue-rinsed friends" and was fond of romantic fiction.

Roger Scruton writes that he was expelled from the school shortly afterwards when, during one of Roger Scruton's plays, the headmaster found the school stage on fire and a half-naked girl putting out the flames.

Roger Scruton 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.

Roger Scruton's mother died around this time; she had been diagnosed with breast cancer and had undergone a mastectomy just before he went to Cambridge.

Roger Scruton 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":.

Roger Scruton said he was the only conservative at Birkbeck, except for the woman who served meals in the Senior Common Room.

Roger Scruton told The Guardian that his colleagues at Birkbeck vilified him over the book.

Roger Scruton 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.

In 1982 Roger Scruton became founding editor of The Salisbury Review, a journal championing conservatism in opposition to Thatcherism, which he edited until 2001.

Roger Scruton wrote that editing The Salisbury Review effectively ended his academic career in the United Kingdom.

The British Association for the Advancement of Science accused the Review of scientific racism, and the University of Glasgow philosophy department boycotted a talk Roger Scruton had been invited to deliver to its philosophy society.

Roger Scruton made fun of anti-racism and the peace movement, and his support for Margaret Thatcher while she was prime minister was regarded, he wrote, as an "act of betrayal for a university teacher".

From 1979 to 1989, Roger Scruton was an active supporter of dissidents in Czechoslovakia under Communist Party rule, forging links between the country's dissident academics and their counterparts in Western universities.

Roger Scruton was detained in 1985 in Brno before being expelled from the country.

Roger Scruton wrote that he had been followed during visits to Poland and Hungary.

Roger Scruton 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".

Roger Scruton took a year's sabbatical from Birkbeck in 1990 and spent it working in Brno in the Czech Republic.

Roger Scruton sold his apartment in Notting Hill Gate, and when he returned to England, he rented a cottage in Stanton Fitzwarren, Swindon, from the Moonies, and an apartment in Albany on Piccadilly, London, from the Conservative MP Alan Clark.

Roger Scruton wrote several articles in defence of smoking around this time, including one in 1998 for The Times, three for the Wall Street Journal, one for City Journal in 2001, and a 65-page pamphlet for the Institute of Economic Affairs, WHO, What, and Why: Trans-national Government, Legitimacy and the World Health Organisation.

Roger Scruton, who said the email had been stolen, replied that he had never concealed his connection with JTI.

Roger Scruton set up a company, Montpelier Strategy LLC, to promote the house as a venue for weddings and similar events.

From 2001 to 2009 Roger Scruton wrote a wine column for the New Statesman, and contributed to The World of Fine Wine and Questions of Taste: The Philosophy of Wine, with his essay "The Philosophy of Wine".

Roger Scruton, who was largely self-taught as a composer, apart from some early guidance from his friend David Matthews, composed two operas setting his own libretti.

Roger Scruton composed Three Lorca Songs, which were performed in the Netherlands by soprano Kristina Bitenc and pianist Jeroen Sarphati in 2009, and he wrote the libretto to Anna, a two-act opera by David Matthews which premiered at The Grange Festival on 14 July 2023.

Roger Scruton was knighted in the 2016 Birthday Honours for "services to philosophy, teaching and public education".

Roger Scruton sat on the editorial board of the British Journal of Aesthetics and on the board of visitors of Ralston College, a new college proposed in Savannah, Georgia, and was a senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank in Washington, DC.

Roger Scruton had made allegedly conspiratorial remarks about the Jewish businessman George Soros.

Immediately after the interview and Eaton's posts went online, Roger Scruton began to be criticised by various politicians and journalists; hours later, Brokenshire dismissed Roger Scruton from the Commission.

When Scruton's dismissal was announced, Eaton posted a photograph of himself on Instagram 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".

Roger Scruton was re-appointed a week later as co-chair of the commission.

Roger Scruton subsequently published The Aesthetics of Architecture, The Aesthetic Understanding, The Aesthetics of Music, and Beauty.

In 2008 a two-day conference was held at Durham University to assess his impact in the field, and in 2012 a collection of essays, Roger Scruton's Aesthetics, edited by Andy Hamilton and Nick Zangwill, was published by Palgrave Macmillan.

Roger Scruton argues that the major feature of perversion is "sexual release that avoids or abolishes the other", which he sees as narcissistic and solipsistic.

Roger Scruton further argued that gay people have no children and consequently no interest in creating a socially stable future.

Roger Scruton therefore considered it justified to "instil in our children feelings of revulsion" towards homosexuality, and in 2007 he challenged the idea that gay people should have the right to adopt.

Roger Scruton told The Guardian in 2010 that he would no longer defend the view that revulsion against homosexuality can be justified.

Roger Scruton contends, following Immanuel Kant, that human beings have a transcendental dimension, a sacred core exhibited in their capacity for self-reflection.

Roger Scruton supported Margaret Thatcher, while remaining sceptical of her view of the market as a solution to everything, but after the Falklands War, he thought that she "recognised that the self-identity of the country was at stake, and that its revival was a political task".

Roger Scruton wrote in Gentle Regrets that he found several of Burke's arguments in Reflections on the Revolution in France persuasive.

Burke 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, Roger Scruton wrote, the strident tone of socialist literature.

Roger Scruton further argued, following Burke, that society is held together by authority and the rule of law, in the sense of the right to obedience, not by the imagined rights of citizens.

Roger Scruton was persuaded by Burke's arguments about the social contract, including that most parties to the contract are either dead or not yet born.

Roger Scruton argued that human beings are creatures of limited and local affections.

Roger Scruton opposed elevating the "nation" above its people, which would threaten rather than facilitate citizenship and peace.

Roger Scruton argued further that the law should not be used as a weapon to advance special interests.

Roger Scruton defines post-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.

Roger 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.

Roger Scruton was critical of the contemporary feminist movement, while reserving praise for suffragists such as Mary Wollstonecraft.

Roger Scruton defined totalitarianism as the absence of any constraint on central authority, with every aspect of life the concern of government.

Roger Scruton agrees with Alain Besancon that the totalitarian society envisaged by George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four can be only understood in theological terms, as a society founded on a transcendental negation.

In 2014, Roger Scruton said he supported English independence because he believed it would uphold friendship between England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, and because the English would have a say in all matters.

Roger Scruton strongly supported Brexit, because he believed that the European 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 the Common Agricultural Policy.

Roger Scruton 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'.

Roger Scruton's family accompanied him to the ceremony, which was performed by Prince Charles at Buckingham Palace.

Roger Scruton died at Cromwell Hospital in London on 12 January 2020, at the age of 75.

Roger Scruton 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.

Roger Scruton's funeral was held on 24 January 2020 at Malmesbury Abbey with the attendance of several peers, Conservative politicians, and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.