![]() ![]() He used to ride to hounds wearing Enoch Powell’s old hunting clothes, although the jacket split the first time he used it. Scruton was a man of parts, some of which seemed irreconcilable: barrister, aesthetician, teacher at Birkbeck College (part of London University with a tradition of a working-class intake), editor of the ultra-Conservative Salisbury Review, and enthusiastic fox hunter. He was subsequently awarded the Czech Republic’s highest civilian honour for his work.ĭuring the 1980s Scruton’s columns in The Times and his editorship of The Salisbury Review made him a hate figure for the left liberal elite. After the collapse of communism, he formed a consultancy firm to make contacts between Western businesses and the new government. Scruton learnt Czech and became immersed in Czech culture. Together with other British academics, mostly from Oxford, Scruton began to work with the Jan Hus educational trust, named after a 13th century Czech reformer and martyr, to provide books, support samizdat production and to teach. They were being put in jail by a Left-wing police force.” The intellectual life was genuinely dangerous. “And at the same time this was a place which was dear to my heart. “I realised that this was a situation that was completely outside anything in my experience,” he remembered. He was eventually arrested and thrown out of the country. When he accompanied Tomin back to his apartment, he found waiting for them at the door a secret policeman who refused to let Scruton in, and then pushed him down the stairs. Turned down for the Tory candidates’ list in 1978 for being “too bookish”, Scruton visited Prague the following year to give a secret lecture with the dissident Czech philosopher Julius Tomin. Appalled by Edward Heath's Conservative government of 1970 to 1974 – “there seemed to be a lot of thinking to be done and no one was doing it” – he founded the Conservative Philosophy Group with the MP Hugh Fraser, Jonathan Aitken (then a journalist) and the academic John Casey. ![]() He resisted attempts to introduce more Foucault and Marx to the curriculum, but decided it would be wise to have a fallback position, read for the Bar and was called in 1978.Īt Birkbeck, Scruton taught only in the evenings, and he was able to pursue a career as a writer and journalist as well as moving into the world of politics. When he arrived he was “in a conservative frame of mind” and his colleagues at the generally Left-wing institution “regarded me with great suspicion”. Two years later Scruton moved to Birkbeck College, London, to take up an appointment as a philosophy lecturer, becoming professor of aesthetics in 1985. Moving to Rome, he wrote a novel that was never published, and returned in 1969 to Cambridge, as a research fellow in aesthetics at Peterhouse. Arriving at Jesus College in 1962, he switched courses on the first day from Natural Sciences to Philosophy.ĭestined for an academic career, he nevertheless had ambitions to be a writer, but took a job at the University of Bordeaux. Scruton was educated at the Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe, from which he was expelled shortly after winning a Cambridge scholarship for putting on a play in which a half-naked girl appeared on a burning stage. His mother, Beryl Claris – always called Johnny – read romantic fiction and “entertained blue-rinsed ladies who appeared miraculously almost as soon as he was out the door”. His father, Jack, a working-class Mancunian, became a teacher, detested the upper classes and loved the English countryside. Roger Vernon Scruton was born on Februat Buntingsthorpe, Lincolnshire. ![]() Roger Scruton: 'I knew I wanted to conserve things rather than pull them down' Christopher Jones He was regularly shouted down in universities and prevented from speaking, yet he enjoyed a reputation as a first-class professional philosopher among academics of all political persuasions. ![]() Sir Roger Scruton, who has died aged 75, was a philosopher and academic variously identified as “one of the nearest things Britain has to a public intellectual”, Britain’s favourite “token reactionary” (his own description), and even “the thinking man’s skinhead”.Īs one of the most contentious figures in British public life, Scruton operated as an academic, journalist and prolific writer, and a lightning rod for criticism and abuse from the political Left. ![]()
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