Roger Scruton
Sir Roger Vernon Scruton, FBA, FRSL (/ˈskruːtən/; 27 February 1944 – 12 January 2020) was an English philosopher, writer, and social critic who specialised in aesthetics and political philosophy, particularly in the furtherance of traditionalist conservative views.[5][6][7]
Sir
Roger Scruton
12 January 2020 (aged 75)
Jesus College, Cambridge; B.A.(1965), M.A.(1967), Ph.D.(1973)[1]
- Philosopher
- writer
- The Meaning of Conservatism (1980)[2]
- Sexual Desire (1986)[3]
- The Aesthetics of Music (1997)
- How to Be a Conservative (2014)
Why Beauty Matters (BBC Two, 2009)
2
- Medal of Merit (First Class) of the Czech Republic (1998)
- Knight Bachelor (United Kingdom, 2016)
- Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland (2019)
- Commander's Cross with Star of the Hungarian Order of Merit (2019)
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, and religion; he also wrote novels and two operas. His publications include The Meaning of Conservatism (1980), Sexual Desire (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.[8] 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, from 1992 to 1995.[9] 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.[10] In the 1980s he helped to 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.[11] Scruton was knighted in the 2016 Birthday Honours for "services to philosophy, teaching and public education".[12]
Early life[edit]
Family background[edit]
Roger Scruton was born in Buslingthorpe, Lincolnshire,[13] 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.[14] The Scruton surname had been acquired relatively recently. Jack's father's birth certificate showed him as Matthew Lowe, after Matthew's mother, Margaret Lowe (Scruton's great-grandmother); the document made no mention of a father. However, Margaret Lowe had decided, for reasons unknown, to raise her son as Matthew Scruton instead. Scruton wondered whether she had been employed at the former Scruton Hall in Scruton, Yorkshire, and whether that was where her child had been conceived.[15]
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.[16] 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.[14] He described his mother as "cherishing an ideal of gentlemanly conduct and social distinction that ... [his] father set out with considerable relish to destroy".[17]
2010s[edit]
Academic posts, knighthood[edit]
The Scrutons returned from the United States to live at Sunday Hill Farm in Wiltshire, and Scruton took an unpaid research professorship at the University of Buckingham.[21] In January 2010 he began an unpaid three-year visiting professorship at the University of Oxford to teach graduate classes on aesthetics,[104] and was made a senior research fellow of Blackfriars Hall, Oxford.[105] In 2010 he delivered the Scottish Gifford Lectures at the University of St Andrews on "The Face of God",[106] and from 2011 until 2014 he held a quarter-time professorial fellowship at St Andrews in moral philosophy.[107][27]
Two novels appeared during this period: Notes from Underground (2014) is based on his experiences in Czechoslovakia,[69] and The Disappeared (2015) deals with child trafficking in a Yorkshire town.[108] Scruton was knighted in the 2016 Birthday Honours for "services to philosophy, teaching and public education".[12] He sat on the editorial board of the British Journal of Aesthetics[109] and on the board of visitors of Ralston College, a new college proposed in Savannah, Georgia,[110] and was a senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C.[111]
Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission[edit]
In November 2018, Communities Secretary James Brokenshire appointed Scruton as unpaid chair of the British government's Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission, established to promote better home design.[112] Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs objected because of remarks Scruton had made years earlier: he had described "Islamophobia" as a "propaganda word", homosexuality as "not normal", lesbianism as an attempt to find "committed love that [a woman] can't get from men any more", and date rape as not a distinct crime. He had also made allegedly conspiratorial remarks about the Jewish businessman George Soros.[113]
In April 2019, an interview of Scruton by George Eaton appeared in the New Statesman. To publicise it, Eaton posted edited extracts from the interview on Twitter, of Scruton talking about Soros, Chinese people and Islam, among other topics, and referred to them as "a series of outrageous remarks".[114][115] Immediately after the interview and Eaton's posts went online, Scruton began to be criticised by various politicians and journalists; hours later, Brokenshire dismissed Scruton from the Commission.[116][117] 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".[115] The next day, Scruton wrote in The Spectator, "We in Britain are entering a dangerous social condition in which the direct expression of opinions that conflict – or merely seem to conflict – with a narrow set of orthodoxies is instantly punished by a band of self-appointed vigilantes."[118] On 12 April, Eaton apologised for his tweets and the Instagram post but otherwise stood by the interview, but would not release a full recording.[119]
On 25 April, Scruton's colleague Douglas Murray, who had obtained a full recording of the interview, published details of it in The Spectator, and wrote that Eaton had conducted a "hit job".[115][120][121] The audio suggested that both the tweets and Eaton's article had omitted relevant context. For example, Scruton had said: "Anybody who doesn't think that there's a Soros empire in Hungary has not observed the facts", but the article omitted: "it's not necessarily an empire of Jews; that's such nonsense."[122] Of the Chinese, Eaton tweeted that Scruton had said: "Each Chinese person is a kind of replica of the next one and that is a very frightening thing."[123] Eaton's article included more words: "They're creating robots out of their own people ... each Chinese person is a kind of replica ...."[116] The transcript showed the full sentence: "In a sense they're creating robots out of their own people by so constraining what can be done,"[124] which suggested the topic was the Chinese Communist Party.[123] In response, the New Statesman published the full transcript.[124]
On 2 May, the New Statesman readers' editor, Peter Wilby, wrote that Eaton's online comments suggested that he had "approached the interview as a political activist, not as a journalist".[114] Two months later, the New Statesman officially apologised.[122] Several days later, Brokenshire also apologised to Scruton.[114][125] Scruton was re-appointed a week later as co-chair of the commission.[126]
Cultural views[edit]
Aesthetics[edit]
According to Paul Guyer, in A History of Modern Aesthetics: The Twentieth Century, "After Wollheim, the most significant British aesthetician has been Roger Scruton."[127] Scruton was trained in analytic philosophy, although he was drawn to other traditions. "I remain struck by the thin and withered countenance that philosophy quickly assumes," he wrote in 2012, "when it wanders away from art and literature, and I cannot open a journal like Mind or The Philosophical Review without experiencing an immediate sinking of the heart, like opening a door into a morgue."[128]
He specialised in aesthetics throughout his career. From 1971 to 1992 he taught aesthetics at Birkbeck College. His PhD thesis formed the basis of his first book, Art and Imagination (1974), in which he argued that "what demarcates aesthetic interest from other sorts is that it involves the appreciation of something for its own sake".[129][130] He subsequently published The Aesthetics of Architecture (1979), The Aesthetic Understanding (1983), The Aesthetics of Music (1997),[9] and Beauty (2010). In 2008 a two-day conference was held at Durham University to assess his impact in the field,[131] and in 2012 a collection of essays, Scruton's Aesthetics, edited by Andy Hamilton and Nick Zangwill, was published by Palgrave Macmillan.[132]
In an Intelligence Squared debate in March 2009, Scruton (seconding historian David Starkey) proposed the motion: "Britain has become indifferent to beauty", and held an image of Botticelli's The Birth of Venus next to one of the supermodel Kate Moss.[133] Later that year he wrote and presented a BBC Two documentary, Why Beauty Matters, in which he argued that beauty should be restored to its traditional position in art, architecture and music.[134] He wrote that he had received "more than 500 e-mails from viewers, all but one saying, 'Thank Heavens someone is saying what needs to be said.'"[135] In 2018 he argued that a belief in God makes for more beautiful architecture:
1998: First Class of the Medal of Merit of the Czech Republic
2015: Knight Bachelor
2019: First Class of the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland
2019: Commander's Cross with Star of the Hungarian Order of Merit
For his work with the Jan Hus Educational Foundation in communist Czechoslovakia, Scruton was awarded the First of June Prize in 1993 by the Czech city of Plzeň. In 1998 Václav Havel, president of the Czech Republic, presented him with the Medal of Merit (First Class).[66] In the UK, he was knighted in the 2016 Birthday Honours for "services to philosophy, teaching and public education".[12] His family accompanied him to the ceremony, which was performed by Prince Charles at Buckingham Palace.[178] In 2016 the European University of Tirana awarded him with Doctor Honoris Causa.[179]
Polish President Andrzej Duda presented Scruton with the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland in June 2019 "for supporting the democratic transformation in Poland".[67][180] In November that year, the Senate of the Czech Parliament awarded him a Silver Medal for his work in support of Czech dissidents.[181] The following month, during a ceremony in London, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán presented him with the Hungarian Order of Merit, Commander's Cross with Star.[182][183]
Death[edit]
After learning in July 2019 that he had cancer, Scruton underwent treatment, including chemotherapy.[70] He died at his home on 12 January 2020 at the age of 75.[184][185] The following day, the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, tweeted: "We have lost the greatest modern conservative thinker – who not only had the guts to say what he thought but said it beautifully."[186][187] The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sajid Javid, referred to Scruton's work behind the Iron Curtain: "From his support for freedom fighters in Eastern Europe to his immense intellectual contribution to conservatism in the West, he made a unique contribution to public life."[186]
Mario Vargas Llosa, a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote: "[Scruton] was one of the most educated people I have ever met. He could speak of music, literature, archeology, 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 ... Scruton's departure leaves a dreadful void around us."[188]
Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan called Scruton "the greatest conservative of our age", adding: "The country has lost a towering intellect. I have lost a wonderful friend." Robert Jenrick, the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, said that Scruton's work on "building more beautifully, submitted recently to my department, will proceed and stand part of his unusually rich legacy".[189] The scholar and former politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali described him as a "dear and generous friend, who gave freely to those who sought advice and wisdom, and he expected little in return".[190] Another friend and colleague, Douglas Murray, paid tribute to Scruton's personal kindness, calling him "one of the kindest, most encouraging, thoughtful, and generous people you could ever have known".[191] Others who paid tribute to Scruton included education reformer Katharine Birbalsingh[192] and cabinet minister Michael Gove who called Scruton "an intellectual giant, a brilliantly clear and compelling writer".[193]
In an essay critical of Scruton's philosophy of aesthetics, "The Art of Madness and Mystery", published in Church Life (a journal of the University of Notre Dame's McGrath Institute) shortly after Scruton's death, Michael Shindler wrote that "like the Roman guard who would not abandon his post during the cataclysm of Pompeii, the late Roger Scruton stands in lonesome majesty as the artistic tradition's greatest defender athwart modernity's aesthetic upheaval."[194]
Scruton's funeral was held on 24 January 2020 at Malmesbury Abbey with the attendance of several peers, Conservative politicians, and the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Following the funeral ceremony, which was presided by the Reverend Oliver Stross, Scruton's remains were buried in the Abbey's churchyard.[195]
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