Roger Vernon Scruton (born 27 February 1944) is a conservative English philosopher and writer. He is the author of over 30 books, including Art and Imagination (1974), Sexual Desire (1986), The Aesthetics of Music (1997), and A Political Philosophy: Arguments for Conservatism (2006). He has also written several novels and two operas.
Scruton was a lecturer and professor of aesthetics at Birkbeck College, London, from 1971 to 1992. In 1982 he helped found The Salisbury Review, a conservative political journal, which he edited for 18 years.[1] Since 1992 he has held part-time positions at Boston University, the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., the University of St Andrews, and the Institute for the Psychological Sciences in Arlington, Virginia—a school affiliated with the Legion of Christ, a conservative Catholic religious congregation.[2] He also founded the Claridge Press in 1987, and sits on the editorial board of the British Journal of Aesthetics.[3] He serves in addition as a member of the International Advisory Board of the Center for European Renewal.[4]
Scruton first embraced conservatism during the student protests of May 1968 in France. Nicholas Wroe wrote in The Guardian that Scruton was in the Latin Quarter in Paris at the time, watching students overturning cars to erect barricades, and tearing up cobblestones to throw at the police. "I suddenly realized 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."[1]
The Meaning of Conservatism (1980)—which he called "a somewhat Hegelian defence of Tory values in the face of their betrayal by the free marketeers"[5]—was the book that he said blighted his academic career. He wrote in Gentle Regrets (2005) that he found several of Edmund Burke's arguments in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) persuasive. Although Burke was writing about revolution, not socialism, Scruton was persuaded that, as he put it, the utopian promises of socialism are accompanied by an abstract vision of the mind that bears little relation to the way most people think. Burke also convinced him that there is no direction to history, no moral or spiritual progress; that people think collectively toward a common goal only during a crisis such as war, and that trying to organize society this way requires a real or imagined enemy; hence, Scruton wrote, the strident tone of socialist literature. He further argued, following Burke, that society is held together by authority, in the sense of the right to obedience, not by the imagined rights of citizens. Obedience, he wrote, is "the prime virtue of political beings, the disposition that makes it possible to govern them, and without which societies crumble into 'the dust and powder of individuality.'" Real freedom, Scruton argued, does not stand in conflict with obedience, but is its other side.[6] He was also persuaded by Burke's arguments about the social contract, including that most parties to the contract are either dead or not yet born. To forget this, he wrote—to throw away customs and institutions—is to "place the present members of society in a dictatorial dominance over those who went before, and those who came after them."[7]
Scruton argued that beliefs that appear to be examples of prejudice may be useful and important: "our most necessary beliefs may be both unjustified and unjustifiable, from our own perspective, and the attempt to justify them will merely lead to their loss." A prejudice in favour of modesty in women and chivalry in men, for example, may aid the stability of sexual relationships and the raising of children, though these are not offered as reasons in support of the prejudice. It may therefore be easy to show the prejudice as irrational, but there will be a loss nonetheless if it is discarded.[8]
In Arguments for Conservatism (2006), he marked out the areas in which philosophical thinking is required if conservatism is to be intellectually persuasive. He argued that human beings are creatures of limited and local affections. Territorial loyalty is at the root of all forms of government where law and liberty reign supreme; every expansion of jurisdiction beyond the frontiers of the nation state leads to a decline in accountability.[9] He opposed elevating the "nation" above its people, which would threaten rather than facilitate citizenship and peace. He argued that "conservatism and conservation" are two aspects of a single policy, that of husbanding resources, including the social capital embodied in laws, customs, and institutions, and the material capital contained in the environment. He argued further that the law should not be used as a weapon to advance special interests; people impatient for reform—for example in the areas of euthanasia or abortion—are reluctant to accept what may be "glaringly obvious to others—that the law exists precisely to impede their ambitions."[10]
He defined post-modernism as the claim that there are no grounds for truth, objectivity, and meaning, and therefore conflicts between views are nothing more than contests of power, and argued that, while the West is required to judge other cultures in their own terms, Western culture is adversely judged as ethnocentric and racist. He wrote: "The very reasoning which sets out to destroy the ideas of objective truth and absolute value imposes political correctness as absolutely binding, and cultural relativism as objectively true."[11]
Scruton contends, following Immanuel Kant, that human beings have a transcendental dimension, a sacred core exhibited in their capacity for self-reflection.[12] He argues that we are in an era of secularization without precedent in the history of the world. He writes that writers and artists such as Rilke, T.S. Eliot, Edward Hopper, and Schoenberg "devoted much energy to recuperating the experience of the sacred—but as a private rather than a public form of consciousness." Scruton argues that because these thinkers directed their art at the few, it has never appealed to the many. He defines totalitarianism as the absence of any constraint on central authority, with every aspect of life the concern of government. Advocates of totalitarianism feed on resentment, Scruton argues, and having seized power they proceed to abolish institutions — such as the law, property, and religion — that create authorities. Scruton writes, "To the resentful it is these institutions that are the cause of inequality, and therefore the cause of their humiliations and failures." He argues that revolutions are not conducted from below by the people, but from above, in the name of the people, by an aspiring elite.[13]
Scruton suggests that the importance of Newspeak in totalitarian societies is that the power of language to describe reality is replaced by language whose purpose is to avoid encounters with realities. He agrees with Alain Besançon 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 accordance with T.S. Eliot, Sruton believes that true originality is only possible within a tradition, and that it is precisely in modern conditions — conditions of fragmentation, heresy, and unbelief — that the conservative project acquires its sense.[14]
Jonathan Dollimore writes that Scruton's Sexual Desire (1986) based a conservative sexual ethic on the Hegelian proposition that "the final end of every rational being is the building of the self," which involves recognizing the other as an end in itself. Scruton argues that the major feature of perversion is "sexual release that avoids or abolishes the other," which he sees as narcissistic and solipsistic.[15] He wrote in an essay, "Sexual morality and the liberal consensus" (1989), that homosexuality is a perversion for that reason: because the body of the homosexual's lover belongs to the same category as his own.[16] In The Guardian in 2010 Scruton stated that he no longer held this view.[17] Mark Dooley writes that Scruton's objective is to show that sexual desire trades in "the currency of the sacred."[18]
Scruton and his two sisters were born to Jack Scruton, a teacher, and his wife Beryl Claris, and raised in Marlow and High Wycombe. Scruton told The Guardian that Jack was from a working-class Manchester family—he hated the upper classes and loved the countryside—and Beryl was fond of romantic fiction and entertaining "blue-rinsed friends."[1] He describes his mother as cherishing an ideal of gentlemanly conduct and social distinction, which his father "set out with considerable relish to destroy."[19] Although his parents had been raised as Christians, they regarded themselves as humanists.[20]
Scruton was educated at Royal Grammar School High Wycombe (1954–1961). He was expelled from the school shortly after winning a scholarship to Cambridge.[1] He studied moral sciences (philosophy) at Jesus College from 1962, receiving a BA in 1965, incepted as MA in 1967. He was awarded a PhD in 1972 for a thesis on aesthetics, also from Cambridge.[21]
Scruton became a research fellow at Peterhouse, Cambridge, in 1969. A group of academics known as the
Peterhouse Right later helped set up
The Salisbury Review, which he edited for 18 years.
After graduating, Scruton spent two years overseas, teaching at the Collège Universitaire at Pau in France. He became a research fellow at Peterhouse, Cambridge in 1969, and in 1971 joined Birkbeck College, London, where he taught philosophy until 1992, first as lecturer, then as reader and professor of aesthetics. He married Danielle Laffitte in 1973; they divorced in 1979. His first book, Art and Imagination, appeared in 1974. Also in 1974 he became one of four board members of the Conservative Philosophy Group, founded that year by Hugh Fraser, the Conservative MP, to develop an intellectual basis for conservatism.[22]
He studied law at the Inns of Court (1974–1976), and was called to the Bar in 1978, though he never practised.[21] His next publication was also in aesthetics, The Aesthetics Of Architecture (1979). In The Meaning of Conservatism (1980), he sought to shift the emphasis of the Right away from economics towards moral issues.[5] He told The Guardian in 2010 that the book blighted his academic career; the newspaper said he was vilified by his colleagues at Birkbeck for his political views.[17]
The Politics Of Culture and Other Essays (1981) followed; then a history and dictionary of philosophy in 1982; The Aesthetic Understanding (1983); textbooks on Kant and Spinoza (1983 and 1987); Thinkers of the New Left (1985), a collection of essays criticizing 14 prominent intellectuals; and Sexual Desire: A Moral Philosophy of the Erotic (1986).
In 1990 Scruton spent a year working for the Jan Hus Educational Foundation, then worked part-time from 1992 to 1995 as professor of philosophy at Boston University, though he continued to live in the UK.[23] He moved to the country, and discovered a passion for fox hunting with hounds.[24] It was through hunting that he met Sophie Jeffreys, an architectural historian; they married in 1996. They have two children, and live on a farm in Brinkworth, Wiltshire.[25] He has set up several firms, including: (i) Central European Consulting, which was established in 1990 to offer business advice in post-communist Central Europe; (ii) Horsell's Farm Enterprises Ltd, established in 1990, and (iii) opendemocracy.net, a political website.[26]
From 2001 to 2009 Scruton wrote a wine column for the New Statesman, and made contributions to The World of Fine Wine and Questions of Taste: The Philosophy of Wine (2007), with his essay The Philosophy of Wine. His I Drink Therefore I am: A Philosopher's Guide to Wine (2009) was in part composed of material from his New Statesman column.[27]
He held several part-time academic positions in the 2000s: from 2005 to 2009 he was research professor at the Institute for the Psychological Sciences in Arlington, Virginia, and from 2009 held a visiting scholarship at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., researching the cultural impact of neuroscience. In January 2010 he was awarded an unpaid visiting professorship at Oxford to teach graduate classes on aesthetics, and in 2011 took up a quarter-time professorial fellowship in moral philosophy at St Andrews. He is also an unpaid research professor at Buckingham University.[28] In 2010 he delivered the Scottish Gifford Lectures at St Andrews on the topic, "The Face of God."[29] A.C. Grayling described him in 2000 as a "wonderful teacher of philosophy. The pedagogic works he wrote for students and the general public are clear, lucid and accurate. It is partly because of Roger's presence that the department [at Birkbeck] is one of the best in the country."[1]
[edit] Editing The Salisbury Review
In 1982 he became founding editor of The Salisbury Review—a journal championing traditional conservatism, in opposition to Thatcherism—set up by a group of Tories known as the Salisbury Group, with the involvement of the Peterhouse Right, a circle of conservatives associated with the Cambridge college, including Maurice Cowling, David Watkin, and the mathematician Adrian Mathias.[1] Scruton wrote in 2002 that editing the journal effectively ended his academic career in the UK. The magazine attempted to provide an intellectual basis for conservatism, and was highly critical of some key issues of the period, including the peace movement, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, egalitarianism, feminism, foreign aid, multiculturalism, and modernism. "At last it was possible to be a conservative and also to the left of something," Scruton wrote, and "it was worth sacrificing your chances of becoming a fellow of the British Academy, a vice-chancellor or an emeritus professor for the sheer relief of uttering the truth."[30]
In 1984 Scruton published in The Salisbury Review a controversial article by school headmaster Ray Honeyford which questioned the benefits of multicultural education. Honeyford was forced to resign because of the article, and had to live for a time under police protection.[1] In 1985 the The Salisbury Review was accused of scientific racism during the annual congress of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and thereafter, Scruton wrote in 2002, the magazine's writers were ostracized in the academic world.[citation needed] Scruton edited the The Salisbury Review until 2001 and remains on its editorial board. He described in 2002 the effect of the editorship on his life: "[it] cost me many thousand hours of unpaid labour, a hideous character assassination in Private Eye, three lawsuits, two interrogations, one expulsion, the loss of a university career in Britain, unendingly contemptuous reviews, Tory suspicion, and the hatred of decent liberals everywhere. And it was worth it."[30]
From 1979–1989 Scruton was an active supporter of dissidents in Eastern Europe under Communist Party rule, forging links—at some risk to himself, according to David Vaughan on Radio Prague—between Czechoslovakia's dissident academics and their counterparts in Western universities. As part of the Jan Hus Educational Foundation, he and other academics visited Prague and Brno, now in the Czech Republic, in support of an underground education network started by the Czech dissident Julius Tomin, helping to smuggle in books and organize lectures, and eventually arranging for students to study for a Cambridge external degree in theology; the theology faculty was chosen because it was the only one that responded to the request for help. He told Vaughan there were structured courses, samizdat translations and printing of books, and people sitting examinations in a cellar with papers smuggled out through the diplomatic bag.[31]
He was detained in 1985 in Brno and was asked to leave the country. Someone who watched him walk across the border with Austria later wrote: "There was this broad empty space between the two border posts, absolutely empty, not a single human being in sight except for one soldier, and across that broad empty space trudged an English philosopher, Roger Scruton, with his little bag into Austria." On 17 June that year he was placed on the Index of Undesirable Persons. He writes that he was also followed during visits to Poland and Hungary. For his work helping the dissidents he was awarded the Czech Republic's Medal of Merit (First Class) in 1998.[32] Peter Hitchens wrote in 2009 of his admiration for Scruton and others who did similar work. Scruton has expressed regret at how certain aspects of Eastern European society have developed since the fall of the Berlin Wall.[33]
Scruton came to public attention in 2002 when it was reported he had been receiving a fee from Japan Tobacco International (JTI), and had written about tobacco issues without declaring an interest. He wrote articles about smoking for The Wall Street Journal in 1998 and 2000, and in 2000 wrote a 65-page pamphlet—"WHO, What, and Why: Trans-national Government, Legitimacy and the World Health Organisation"—for the Institute of Economic Affairs, a British self-styled free-market think-tank. The pamphlet criticized the World Health Organization's (WHO) campaign against smoking, arguing that transnational bodies should not seek to influence domestic legislation because they are not answerable to the electorate. He wrote that overall he was against tobacco—his own father died of emphysema after smoking for many years—but that it was an innocent pleasure.[34]
Scruton has written three libretti, two of which he set to music. The first, a one-act chamber opera called The Minister, has been performed several times. The second, a two-act opera called Violet, was performed twice at the Guildhall School of Music in London in December 2005; it is based on the life of Violet Gordon-Woodhouse, the British harpsichordist.[28]
In March 2007 he debated Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and A. C. Grayling in London on the topic "Are We Better Off Without Religion?"[35] In March 2009, at the Royal Geographical Society, seconding the historian David Starkey, Scruton proposed the motion: "Britain has become indifferent to beauty" by holding an image of Botticelli's The Birth of Venus next to an image of the British supermodel Kate Moss, to demonstrate how British perceptions of beauty had declined to the "level of our crudest appetites and our basest needs".[36]
- Nonfiction
- Art And Imagination (1974)
- The Aesthetics Of Architecture (1979)
- The Meaning Of Conservatism (1980)
- The Politics Of Culture and Other Essays (1981)
- A Short History of Modern Philosophy (1982)
- A Dictionary Of Political Thought (1982)
- The Aesthetic Understanding (1983)
- Kant (1983)
- Untimely Tracts (1985)
- Thinkers Of The New Left (1986)
- Sexual Desire: A Moral Philosophy of the Erotic (1986)
- Spinoza (1987)
- A Land Held Hostage: Lebanon and the West (1987)
- The Philosopher On Dover Beach and Other Essays (1989)
- Conservative Texts (1992)
- Modern Philosophy (1994)
- The Classical Vernacular: architectural principles in an age of nihilism (1995)
- Animal Rights and Wrongs (1996)
- An Intelligent Person's Guide To Philosophy (1996); republished in 2005 as Philosophy: Principles and Problems
- The Aesthetics Of Music (1997)
- An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture (1998)
- On Hunting (1998)
- Spinoza (1998)
- England: An Elegy (2001)
- The West and the Rest: Globalisation and the terrorist threat (2002)
- Death-Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner's Tristan und Isolde (2004)
- News From Somewhere: On Settling (2004)
- The Need for Nations (2004)
- Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life (2005)
- Animal Rights and Wrongs (2006)
- A Political Philosophy: Arguments for Conservatism (2006)
- Immigration, Multiculturalism and the Need to Defend the Nation State (2006)
- Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged (2007)
- Beauty (2009)
- I Drink Therefore I am: A Philosopher's Guide to Wine (2009)
- Understanding Music (2009)
- The Uses of Pessimism: And the Danger of False Hope (2010)
- Green Philosophy: How to Think Seriously about the Planet (2012)
- The Face of God: The Gifford Lectures (2012)
- Fiction
- Fortnight's Anger: a novel (1981)
- Francesca: a novel (1991)
- A Dove Descending and Other Stories (1991)
- Xanthippic Dialogues (1993)
- Perictione in Colophon (2000)
- Opera
- The Minister (1994)
- Violet (2005)
- Television
- Why Beauty Matters (BBC 2009)
- ^ a b c d e f g Wroe, Nicholas. "Thinking for England", The Guardian, 28 October 2000.
- ^ "About", roger-scruton.com, accessed 5 September 2010.
- ^ "Roger Scruton", American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, accessed 5 December 2010.
- ^ "The Center for European Renewal". http://www.europeanrenewal.org/main/page.php?page_id=1. Retrieved October 20, 2011.
- ^ a b Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life, 2005, p. 51.
- ^ Gentle Regrets, pp. 40–41.
- ^ Gentle Regrets, p. 43.
- ^ Gentle Regrets, p. 42.
- ^ Arguments for Conservatism, pp. 3, 19.
- ^ Arguments for Conservatism, pp. 15, 34, 69.
- ^ Arguments for Conservatism, pp. 106, 115, 117.
- ^ Dooley, Mark. Roger Scruton: The Philosopher on Dover Beach. Continuum, 2009, pp. 12, 42.
- ^ Arguments for Conservatism (2006), pp.142–143, 146–147, 150–153.
- ^ Arguments for Conservatism (2006), pp. 162–163, 182, 194.
- ^ Dollimore, Jonathan. Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault. Oxford University Press, 1991, pp. 260–261.
- ^ Scruton, Roger. The Philosopher on Dover Beach. Carcanet Press Limited, 1990, p. 268.
- ^ a b Edemariam, Aida. "Roger Scruton: A pessimist's guide to life", The Guardian, 5 June 2010.
- ^ Dooley, Mark. Roger Scruton: The Philosopher on Dover Beach. Continuum, 2009. p. 53.
- ^ Scruton, Roger. Gentle Regrets: Thoughts From a Life. Continuum, 2005, p.11.
- ^ Scruton, Roger. "The New Humanism", American Spectator, March 2009.
- ^ a b "About", roger-scruton.com, accessed 5 September 2010.
- ^ Gentle Regrets, 2005, p. 45.
- ^ "Roger Scruton", roger-scruton.com, accessed 19 April 2011.
- ^ On Hunting (1998).
- ^ Nicholas Wroe. "Thinking for England | Books". The Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2000/oct/28/politics. Retrieved 2012-04-07.
- ^ "Company interests", roger-scruton.com, accessed 5 September 2010.
- ^ Quinn, Anthony. "I Drink Therefore I Am by Roger Scruton", The Guardian, 20 December 2009.
- ^ a b "About", roger-scruton.com, accessed 5 September 2010.
- ^ "The Face of God", University of St Andrews Gifford Lectures, 25 March 2010, accessed 6 December 2010.
- ^ a b Scruton, Roger. "My life beyond the pale", The Spectator, 21 September 2002—Glasgow University p. 2; alleged Observer libel, p. 3.
- ^ Vaughan, David. "Roger Scruton and a special relationship", Radio Prague, 31 October 2010.
- ^ Day 1999, pp. 255, 281–282.
- ^ Scruton, Roger. "The flame that was snuffed out by freedom", The Times, 7 November 2009.
- ^ Scruton, Roger. "A Mad World Is Assaulting Us Smokers," and "Anything Goes—Except Smoking," The Wall Street Journal, 2 and 9 February 1998.
- Scruton, Roger. "The Risks of being Risk-free", The Wall Street Journal, 7 January 2000.
- Scruton, Roger. "WHO, What, and Why: Trans-national government, Legitimacy and the World Health Organisation", Institute of Economic Affairs, May 2000, pp. 9–14.
- ^ "Are we better off without religion?", The Times, 29 March 2007.
- ^ Bayley, Stephen. "Britain has become indifferent to beauty", The Observer, 22 March 2009.
- Roger Scruton's website, accessed 5 September 2010.
- The Salisbury Review, accessed 27 December 2010.
- Roger Scruton wine articles, New Statesman, October 2005 – August 2009, accessed 27 December 2010.
- Billings, Joshua. "A Joy Forever?", review of Scruton's Beauty, Oxonian Review, 11 May 2009.
- Kimball, Roger. "An Assault on Mush", The New York Times, 17 February 1991.
- Dehn, Georgia. "World of Roger Scruton, writer and philosopher", The Telegraph, 27 Jan 2012.
- Rose, Steven, and Rose, Hilary. "Less than human nature: biology and the new right", Race and Class, XXVII, 3, 1986.
- Scruton, Roger. "The Case against Feminism," The Observer, 22 May 1983.
-
- Morrison, Blake. "In Defence of Feminism," The Observer, 29 May 1983.
| Persondata |
| Name |
Scruton, Roger |
| Alternative names |
|
| Short description |
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| Date of birth |
27 February 1944 |
| Place of birth |
Manchester |
| Date of death |
|
| Place of death |
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