Roger Scruton turned conservative while watching Paris students overturn cars
In May 1968, a young Cambridge philosopher visiting Paris saw students tearing up cobblestones in the Latin Quarter and felt, for the first time, political anger on the other side. Roger Scruton went on to write over 50 books, champion beauty in architecture and quietly help scholars behind the Iron Curtain.
He was born on 27 February 1944 in Buslingthorpe, Lincolnshire, and raised in High Wycombe and Marlow. His father Jack, a Manchester teacher who had been pulled out of school at 14 to labour, was a fierce socialist who loathed the upper classes and even banned Beatrix Potter as bourgeois. The family name itself was a puzzle: his grandfather's birth certificate said Matthew Lowe, and nobody knew why his great-grandmother chose Scruton instead. From that difficult father he nonetheless absorbed a love of local buildings, of home, and a distrust of modernism.
School produced distinctions in maths and the sciences, a scholarship to Jesus College, Cambridge, and a father who stopped speaking to him over it. Caught dodging a Tube fare, the teenager gave his name to police as John Stuart Mill. On his first day at Cambridge he swapped natural sciences for philosophy, graduating with a double first in 1965; his 1973 doctorate on art and imagination became his first book.
From 1971 to 1992 he taught at Birkbeck College in London, rising to Professor of Aesthetics, while claiming to be the only conservative there apart from a woman who served lunch in the common room. In 1974 he co-founded a dining club meant to give conservatism an intellectual footing; Margaret Thatcher attended before becoming prime minister. In 1982 he became founding editor of The Salisbury Review, a journal whose circulation in 1983 was under 1,000, and he later said editing it effectively ended his British academic career.
Freelance from 1995 after a spell at Boston University, he wrote on music, sexual desire and how to be a conservative. His underground teaching networks in Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe during the 1980s earned him a Czech Medal of Merit from Vaclav Havel in 1998, and a knighthood followed in 2016. He chaired a government commission on beautiful building from 2019 until his death on 12 January 2020.
Source: Roger Scruton
