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 conservative views.

[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.

[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.

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.

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":[31] I suddenly realised I was on the other side.

[14]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.

[21][37] In 1974, along with Hugh Fraser, Jonathan Aitken and John Casey, he became a founding member of the Conservative Philosophy Group dining club, which aimed to develop an intellectual basis for conservatism.

The magazine sought to provide an intellectual basis for conservatism, and was highly critical of key issues of the period, including the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, egalitarianism, feminism, foreign aid, multiculturalism and modernism.

)[56] In 2002 he described 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.

The most contentious publication was Thinkers of the New Left (1985), a collection of his essays from The Salisbury Review, which criticized 14 prominent intellectuals, including E. P. Thompson, Michel Foucault and Jean-Paul Sartre.

[60] 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".

[73][81] Scruton and his publisher were sued for libel that year by the Pet Shop Boys for suggesting, in his book An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture (1998), that their songs were in large part the work of sound engineers; the group settled for undisclosed damages.

[84] In response to The Guardian article, the Financial Times ended his contract as a columnist,[94] The Wall Street Journal suspended his contributions,[95][96] and the Institute for Economic Affairs said it would introduce an author-declaration policy.

[21] Scruton also 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.

[12] He sat on the editorial board of the British Journal of Aesthetics[110] and on the board of visitors of Ralston College, a new college proposed in Savannah, Georgia,[111] and was a senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C.[112] 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.

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".

[120] 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".

[125] 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".

In 2008 a two-day conference was held at Durham University to assess his impact in the field,[132] and in 2012 a collection of essays, Scruton's Aesthetics, edited by Andy Hamilton and Nick Zangwill, was published by Palgrave Macmillan.

[133] 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.

'"[136] In 2018 he argued that a belief in God makes for more beautiful architecture: Who can doubt, on visiting Venice, that this abundant flower of aesthetic endeavour was rooted in faith and watered by penitential tears?

[152] He argues that we are in an era of secularization without precedent in the history of the world; writers and artists such as Rainer Maria Rilke, T. S. Eliot, Edward Hopper and Arnold Schoenberg "devoted much energy to recuperating the experience of the sacred – but as a private rather than a public form of consciousness."

[156]Scruton was best known for his writing in support of conservatism,[157][158] and his intellectual heroes were Edmund Burke, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, John Ruskin, and T. S.

[24][161] He 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".

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 crises 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.

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.

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".

[24] However, he praised Germaine Greer in 2016, saying that she had "cast an awful lot of light on our literary tradition" by showing the male as the dominant figure, and defended her against criticism for having used the word "sex" to describe the difference between men and women, rather than "gender", which Scruton called "politically correct".

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".

[191] 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".