Roger Scruton, 1944-2012

• Roger Scruton: Conservative thinker dies at 75 BBC News. 01/12/20.

• Tributes paid to ‘unusually rich legacy’ of philosopher Sir Roger Scruton St Helens Star 01/12/20.

• Roger Scruton, R.I.P. by Michael Brendan Dougherty. National Review 0/13/20.

• The ‘great adventure’ of Sir Roger Scruton, RIP by Rev. Ben Johnson. The Acton Institute. 1/13/20.

• The philosopher’s mind at its end Dr. Mark Dooley, Sir Roger Scuton’s biographer on the last days of a giant. The Critic 02/12/20:

  In my books on Scruton, I consistently emphasised this theme of the sacred which has featured, either directly or implicitly, since his earliest works on aesthetics and architecture. But what does he mean by it? The best insight is offered in an essay from 1986, entitled ‘The Philosopher on Dover Beach’: ‘[T]he free being is incarnate, and to see human life as a vehicle for freedom – to see a face where the scientist sees flesh and bone – is to recognise that this, at least, is sacred, that this small piece of earthly matter is not to be treated as a means to our purposes, but as an end in itself’.

  When we lovingly behold another person, or when we contemplate an artwork, listen to music or marvel at a beautiful building, we experience something that transcends its material constraints. That ‘something’ is not separable from the material or biological order which contains it. But every time we gaze into the eyes of a loved one, or whenever we savour our favourite symphony or pray at a beautiful shrine, we encounter ‘personality and freedom’ shining forth from what is ‘contingent, dependent and commonplace’. We see the fabric of the world perforated by light from another sphere. In this point of intersection of the timeless with time, we catch glimpses of the transcendental and receive intimations of the infinite. ...

• The Hounds In Full Cry: Roger Scruton’s Conservatism, by Bradley J. Birzer. American Conservative 01/14/20:

  One of the greatest dangers of the modern world—beginning with the Enlightenment and exploding with the French Revolution—was the imperialism of the political sphere. For nearly three centuries now, the West has seen the political sphere expand so rapidly that it has subsumed almost every aspect of our lives, and with globalization, uncontrollable forces of consumerism and selfishness have “broken free of the forces—religious, moral and national—which used to limit it,” while decimating “the old local pieties, the old customs, and the local attachments.”

  Once we politicize everything, Scruton feared, there will be nothing left but power, the struggle for power, and, consequently, only the nihilism of the abyss. To his consternation, he saw nihilism, widespread by 2007, “as the addictive drumbeats and soundbytes that form the background of popular culture.” Corporations, owing nothing to loyalty and attempting only to satiate the appetites, would never defend the good, the true, or the beautiful. “Nobody in the corporatist society will wish to fight for his neighbor’s rights, to devote his life to a cause, or to lay down his life for his country,” he lamented. “Indeed, he is unlikely to know which country is his.”

  The rise of Donald Trump in the United States especially worried Scruton, as he saw it as further proof of the decay of Western society. “Mr. Trump has at best only a distorted vision. He is the product of the cultural decline that is rapidly consigning our artistic and philosophical inheritance to oblivion,” Scruton argued in 2018.

• Remembering Roger Scruton, Defender of Reason in a World of Postmodern Jackals, by Barbara Kay. Quillette 01/14/20:

  Scruton’s breadth of knowledge was astonishing. None of his enemies could dispute that. He wrote whole books with complete authority on religion, architecture, opera, the environment, Islam, philosophy. But running through them all was a guilt-free love for, and fidelity to his—our—cultural inheritance. He loved his own home, England, and he would not repudiate it for its disfiguring historical warts, which seemed to preoccupy almost everyone else. It was Scruton who gave us the word “oikophobia”—hatred of one’s home—which is the hallmark of progressivism. He was out of sync with the hey-hey-ho-ho-western-civ-has-got-to-go zeitgeist. ...

• In Memoriam: Roger Scruton, by Allan Carlson. Front Porch Republic 01/14/20:

  In what will be one of his last newly published essays, Roger Scruton offers a similar message to Americans. Providing a Preface to the forthcoming Land and Liberty: The Best of FREE AMERICA [edited by yours truly and published by the Wethersfield Institute], Roger embraces the vision of the American agrarians and distributists who produced this journal from 1937 to 1946. As he summarizes: “The real wealth of a country … does not reside in the hectic exchanges on the stock market or the rivers of commodities that flow through every household without belonging there. It resides in local communities, in the work that holds them together, and the deep investment represented by a home, a place and the endowment across generations of human love.”

• Roger Scruton, Philosopher of a ‘Humane and Moderate Politics’ National Review 01/13/20.

• Roger Scruton, a man who seemed bigger than the age Spectator USA. 01/12/20:

  Doubtless there will be some talk in the coming days of ‘controversy’. Some score settling may even go on. So it is worth stressing that on the big questions of his time Roger Scruton was right. During the Cold War he faced an academic and cultural establishment that was either neutral or actively anti-Western on the big question of the day. Roger not only thought right, but acted right. Not many philosophers become men of action. But with the ‘underground university’ that he and others set up, he did just that. During the Seventies and Eighties at considerable risk to himself he would go behind the Iron Curtain and teach philosophy to groups of knowledge-starved students. If Roger and his colleagues had been largely leftist thinkers infiltrating far-right regimes to teach Plato and Aristotle there have been multiple Hollywood movies about them by now. But none of that mattered. Public notice didn’t matter. All that mattered was to do the right thing and to keep the flame of philosophical truth burning in societies where officialdom was busily trying to snuff it out.

• The Last Speech: “A Thing Called Civilization” On September 19, 2019, at the fourteenth annual Gala for Western Civilization, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute presented Sir Roger Scruton with the Defender of Western Civilization award. Sir Roger gave these remarks on accepting the award. He had recently been diagnosed with cancer, the disease that would bring about his death on January 12, 2020.

• The Passing Of A Giant, by Michael Warren Davis. 1/12/20:

  ... Because of Sir Roger, there was never any doubt that conservatism was something more than a mere confederacy of bigots and cranks, as the Left supposes. It’s something far greater than the raw profiteering of Beltway think-tankers—the “sophisters, economists, and calculators” that Edmund Burke warned against just two short centuries ago.

  Scruton’s conservatism wasn’t a “temperament,” as the smart set like to call it; it certainly wasn’t an ideology. His conservatism was a complete way of being. It was posture of defiance against the arrogant, imperial hideousness of modern life.

  He was an elitist, to be sure, in the sense that he believed there was a difference between civilization and barbarism, between taste and fashion, between true genius and mere pretentiousness. But he was also, in his way, a populist. Throughout his life, he was motivated by a righteous anger at the modern elites who pillaged Western man’s inheritance. The great conviction at the heart of his philosophy—the single belief that moves through all of his writing—is that everyone has a right to beauty.

• Roger Scruton: In Memoriam, by Paul Kraus. The Imaginative Conservative:

  Like moths attracted to the flame, students from all continents came together to study and discuss everything from music and aesthetics to politics and metaphysics with Sir Roger, who seemed to be the incarnate flame of wisdom. He was our Virgil through hell and purgatory, and he left us at the top of the mountain, pointing to the light that lay beyond. Befitting a man of such humility, he once revealed that instead of being remembered as the world-class philosopher he was, he wished to be remembered as the organist for the small Anglican parish of which he was a member...

• Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left - Against The Grain Review, 05/03/16:

  The original publication of Scruton's Thinkers of the New Left in 1985 reportedly "brought his career as an academic philosopher to an end", say Roger Scruton in an interview with Ricochet. This is not to say he was censored outright ("the people on the left don't 'censor' -- they look with compassion on your stupidity, take you quietly to the side, and recommend quietly that you retire for a while"). Rather, so great was the negative outcry from the left that his publisher eventually surrendered all copies, removed them from bookshops and relocated them to Scruton's garden. ...