Sir Roger Vernon Scruton FBA FRSL; 27 February 1944 – 12 January 2020) was an English philosopher and writer who specialized in aesthetics and political philosophy, particularly in the
furtherance of traditionalist conservative views.
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 most notable 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 embraced conservatism after witnessing the May 1968 student protests in France. From 1971 to 1992 he was a lecturer and professor of aesthetics at Birkbeck College, London, after which he held several part-time academic positions, including in the United States. 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. Scruton was knighted in the 2016 Birthday Honours for "services to philosophy, teaching and public education."
The Salisbury Review
In 1982 Scruton became founding editor of The Salisbury Review, a journal championing traditional conservatism in opposition to Thatcherism, which he edited until 2001. The Review was set up by a group of Tories known as the Salisbury Group—founded in 1978 by Diana Spearman and Robert Gascoyne-Cecil—with the involvement of the Peterhouse Right. The latter were conservatives associated with the Cambridge college, including Maurice Cowling, David Watkin and the mathematician Adrian Mathias.
Scruton wrote that editing The Salisbury Review effectively ended his academic career in the United Kingdom. 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. To begin with, Scruton had to write most of the articles himself, using pseudonyms: "I had to make it look as though there was something there in order that there should be something there!" He believes that the Review "helped a new generation of conservative intellectuals to emerge. At last it was possible to be a conservative and also to the left of something, to say 'Of course, the Salisbury Review is beyond the pale; but ...'"
In 1984 the Review published a controversial article by Ray Honeyford, a headmaster in Bradford, questioning the benefits of multicultural education. Honeyford was forced to retire because of the article and had to live for a time under police protection. The British Association for the Advancement of Science accused the Review of scientific racism, and the University of Glasgow philosophy department boycotted a talk Scruton had been invited to deliver to its philosophy society. Scruton believed that the incidents made his position as a university professor untenable, although he also maintained that "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." (Scruton was in fact elected a fellow of the British Academy in 2008.) 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. And it was worth it.
Writing
The 1980s established Scruton as a prolific writer. Thirteen of his non-fiction works appeared between 1980 and 1989, as did first novel, Fortnight's Anger (1981). 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. According to The Guardian, the book was remaindered after being greeted with "derision and outrage". Scruton said he became very depressed by the criticism. In 1987 he founded his own publisher, The Claridge Press, which he sold to the Continuum International Publishing Group in 2002.
From 1983 to 1986 he wrote a weekly column for The Times. Topics included music, wine and motorbike repair, but others were contentious. The features editor, Peter Stothard, said that there was no one he had ever commissioned "whose articles had provoked more rage". 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". His first column,
"The Virtue of Irrelevance", argued that universities were destroying education "by making it relevant": "Replace pure by applied mathematics, logic by computer programming, architecture by engineering, history by sociology: the result will be a new generation of well-informed philistines, whose charmlessness will undo every advantage which their learning might otherwise have conferred." Scruton also seemed to call for a resumption of covert CIA funding, deploring in 1985 that "the CIA is now utterly intimidated, refusing to engage even in its most honorable occupation—the support of those publications which tell the truth about the modern world."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Scruton
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