Well said. His “Fools and Frauds” book is a masterpiece, and he was brave enough to turn the left’s buzzwords upside down – for “xenophobia”, for example, see “oikophobia”, which illuminates the snobbery involved in multiculturalism. Moreover, he worked across the cultural and political board – art, education, foreign powers, foreign policy – which most conservatives had basely abandoned. Hence his immensely brave opposition to mass immigration. As Eric Kaufman has noted, he knew full well that such a process carries implications inimical to any truly conservative view of society; that, as Caldwell has pointed out, it is a sort of revolution. The left hated him because the left IS hate – it views itself as virtue and its opponents as evil. The centre hated him because he reminded them that humankind is not a purely reasonable creature. And his fellow right wingers flinched from him because of their abiding cowardice. And yet, his abundant insights, clearly expressed, will provide nourishment and inspiration to the increasing numbers who note society’s plight and wish to do something about it.
Only when I started reading Unherd last year did I learn of Roger Scruton, and that was probably because many articles appeared following his death. I will certainly look for his works at my local library.
Is there a successor to Scruton? Who will pick up the torch of defending conservatism in the current age? Who, if anyone, has the ability to do so?
While he’s certainly a good read, I wouldn’t call Gray a conservative… I mean he writes for the New Statesman, the very magazine that libeled Scruton shortly before his death.
Well, if you mean a conservative in the political sense, definitely, he’s not – he thought Thatcher/Blair neoliberalism an abomination and destructive of society, for example.
I’m more thinking of his utter repudiation of this imposter called progress, his criticism of pure reason and indulgence of the numinous, and his support for the concept of community rooted in the nation state.
I think that’s pretty conservative.
That he writes for the New Statesman is neither here nor there. Helen Thompson does too. They have both incidentally also written for Unherd.
Gray is a brilliant writer and his use, and references, of an astonishingly wide range of literature and writing make him difficult to pin down as simply conservative, or not. He is thought-provoking, challenging and utterly fascinating. I must read some Scruton properly – I’ve only read bits and pieces.
Gray is not a conservative but he is of a rare kind: an honest atheist, in that he faces up to the consequences of atheism with a clear eyed, honest intellect and takes the consequences. He always seems to have far more ire for the dishonest atheists still munching off the carcass of Christianity than he does for Christians themselves.
John Gray has always quite skillfully avoided being pigeon-holed as this or that – a ‘conservative’ or right winger
NS is a plural publication, not tribally ‘leftist’. But the fact they publish his pieces is still quite funny
He is. What conservative would say (Telegraph, July 23rd) “while nothing is more important than the economy and economic growth, the cultural underpinnings of our country matter too.” What conservative thinks that the most important thing in the lives of nations is their economies? What conservative thinks that, while the cultures of nations matter, they do so only as well, usefully, as underpinnings? That’s more Marx than Scruton.
The remark does illustrate its own truth, of course. Considered as payable, it is a part of that economy and economic growth than which nothing is more important; while considered as thinkable, it is part of the culture that does underpin—if not the country, then its politics—called by Matthew Arnold, “philistinism”.
I was so pleased to have discovered Roger Scruton a few years ago, and had the pleasure of seeing the talks and interviews he gave before his death. Reading this tribute has energised me to re-read Fools, Frauds and Firebrands. I’m going to add his Heretics work to that list.
Stephen Rose
2 years ago
I can’t say I knew Roger Scruton well, but I met him a couple of times in the early 80s then again by chance in a hotel bar in Brecon in the early 90s. I knew his first wife when we were both on scholarships in Madrid.
Even when he was the coming man, in the 80s, there was something introspective, modest and diffident about him. He was certainly humourous and had the gentlest way of exposing the folly of your argument.
His conservatism,stressed the conserve, particularly the cultural traditions of the west and his deep love of rural England.
Looking back to the Conservative high water mark in the 80s and the push and shove of their doctrine, I can’t imagine that the Tories could ever have fully embraced him. Margaret Thatcher would cross a road to have an argument, Roger Scruton was discomforted, but his integrity and intellect made him speak.
Lindsay G
2 years ago
As an artist, “Why Beauty Matters” was very influential for me. I would recommend it to anyone in the visual arts.
Indeed, anyone with remotely conservative sympathies appears to have little companionship, often being dismissed as a bigot. This article is a lovely tribute to a great thinker.
James Finnemore
2 years ago
He used to write a wonderful column in the Financial Times about rural life.
Rebecca Bartleet
2 years ago
I agree, it should be essential reading. He had more knowledge and understanding of Islam than nearly all of his critics.
Chris Wheatley
2 years ago
I have read quite a few of Scruton’s books. I always think afterwards, ‘That was great.’ But I have never wanted to read one a second time.
On the positive side, they are beautifully written but not easy – there is (for me) a little bit of a challenge. They are books to be read slowly and sipped after a meal. They are against modern trends and stick up for the good things of life, good literature for example.
On the negative side, I know that I would be revolted (yes, revolted) if I read one as a young person. These are books for people who have made it in life, not for those who are struggling to make ends meet. Scruton is a posher version of Theodore Dalrymple.
I’m inclined to disagree with you on that last point, Chris. I first came across Scruton’s work a couple of years ago when I had just left High School (in Australia) and was working as an agricultural labourer on a local farm for 10 months while saving up to go to uni, and I instantly fell in love with his books and credit him more than anyone for my current political beliefs. I think his political philosophy is actually quite positive for younger people, in that it shows the younger reader that their existence can be seen as something of a continuation of a grand cultural and political history: which is a positive and strong counterpoint to both Left-wing self-hatred and and Right-wing hyper-individualism.
I, too, shall have to disagree with you on that point, Chris. I first came upon Scruton in the early 2000s, when, indeed, life was going very well. Then came a significant crisis in my life – severe depression and much else besides. In time, it robbed me of my faith, my wife and my job. Two stays of several months in hospital – and mental health care in Ireland is primitive – added to my over all trials. In the end, philosophy saved me, first the Stoics and then others, among them a second reading of Scruton, this time with the ‘benefit’ of having suffered. His aesthetic vision and the general feel of his philosophy was, with among other things and thinkers, instrumental in my recovery. A recovery not back to the old, but to something renewed and changed. I cannot agree to all that he wrote – I should imagine that he would have distained anyone who did – but even in disagreement I can at least admire the mind in action, and sometimes the emotional disposition that drove his thought. He once defined conservatives as “those who have a love for the actual and the desire to preserve it”. Plenty of emotion there!
I’m aware the above is less and argument and more of a testimony but you might indulge me in that.
I should note, in contrast to some others here in the comments, that he was critical of Thatcher and Regan. He admired them, but was not uncritical of them.
Julie Kemp
2 years ago
Douglas, you are so good with words and ideas – in conversation and in print.
Tom O'Carroll
2 years ago
A heretic? Scruton? Ridiculous! You don’t get a knighthood without being a pillar of the establishment.
Strange that the gay Douglas Murray (a fine writer, whom I much admire) is such a fanboy bearing in mind that Scruton was no fan of homosexuality: he regarded homosexual acts as morally suspect on grounds of narcissism and obscenity. His denunciations of “unworthy” sexuality were ferocious, deliberately using hate-speech such as “perverted”, “disgusting” and “vile”. He would have felt at home as a hack on the Daily Mail!
For a genuinely heretical (i.e. controversially radical) view of sexual ethics, UnHerd readers might try my open access article “Childhood ‘Innocence’ is Not Ideal”, in Sexuality & Culture. A substantial section is devoted to taking issue with Scruton’s views as expressed in his book Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation. I also blog as “Heretic TOC”. Unlike Scruton’s reissued book, you get what it says on the tin.
Tom O’Carroll
Well if you dismiss someone’s entire work because of a modish leftist focus on ‘offence’ against approved groups (which of course exclude straight white men) that doesn’t sound very wise, philosophical or illuminating.
I’m gay and I really don’t care if people critique homosexuality. We need to grow up and stop screeching about being offended. Scruton has anyway a lot more to offer. Plus a hidden but much more fashionable homophobia has emerged with the woke focus on gender identity as far more important than sex.
Mark Gourley
2 years ago
Sorry Douglas. Wagner is a bore and Scruton was a homophobe. But these days we need to stick together……..
Richard Slack
2 years ago
I heard on Radio 3 a selection of classical music pieces dear to Scruton’s heart and thought it interesting that most of them were dear to mine also. So I may give his writings on Wagner a look, it is just possible he has something intersting to say. (Original is probably to big an ask)
However Murray’s piece seems to portray Scruton as a lone voice crying into the winds of the widerness. In fact in the 1980s had a “Conservative Philisophy Group” organised by him which the Prime Minister sometimes attended, (as did Enoch Powell) a column in the Times and various other publications (I think even the Guardian gave him space) and a lectureship in Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London. His books got published. This seems rather modern actually, conservative people using their social media platforms to publicise their newspaper articles on how they are being “cancelled”, I think Scruton may have been able to see the irony here.
Douglas, you do know you have won, don’t you? You have the Brexit you always wanted, you have the complete restoration of both Class and Money totally dominating political life with juicy chunks of patronage and favours handed out to courtiers, institutions atrophied scarred and scared in the face of political power ruthlessly used. We now know what we should have already known that there is a gaping wound where our Constitution ought to be. The press is supine and the BBC and broadcast media now cowering. The Labour Party’s 2019 manifesto, in truth, promised the sort of society I was born into in the 1950s and MacMillan’s government; this was monstered as though Lenin had read it at the Finland Station; Starmer will denature the Labour Party to the point at which Money is not evenly remotely threatened.
I think Scruton would be happy with this outcome.
Well said. His “Fools and Frauds” book is a masterpiece, and he was brave enough to turn the left’s buzzwords upside down – for “xenophobia”, for example, see “oikophobia”, which illuminates the snobbery involved in multiculturalism. Moreover, he worked across the cultural and political board – art, education, foreign powers, foreign policy – which most conservatives had basely abandoned. Hence his immensely brave opposition to mass immigration. As Eric Kaufman has noted, he knew full well that such a process carries implications inimical to any truly conservative view of society; that, as Caldwell has pointed out, it is a sort of revolution. The left hated him because the left IS hate – it views itself as virtue and its opponents as evil. The centre hated him because he reminded them that humankind is not a purely reasonable creature. And his fellow right wingers flinched from him because of their abiding cowardice. And yet, his abundant insights, clearly expressed, will provide nourishment and inspiration to the increasing numbers who note society’s plight and wish to do something about it.
Point very well made
Many thanks.
Only when I started reading Unherd last year did I learn of Roger Scruton, and that was probably because many articles appeared following his death. I will certainly look for his works at my local library.
Is there a successor to Scruton? Who will pick up the torch of defending conservatism in the current age? Who, if anyone, has the ability to do so?
John Gray ?
While he’s certainly a good read, I wouldn’t call Gray a conservative… I mean he writes for the New Statesman, the very magazine that libeled Scruton shortly before his death.
Well, if you mean a conservative in the political sense, definitely, he’s not – he thought Thatcher/Blair neoliberalism an abomination and destructive of society, for example.
I’m more thinking of his utter repudiation of this imposter called progress, his criticism of pure reason and indulgence of the numinous, and his support for the concept of community rooted in the nation state.
I think that’s pretty conservative.
That he writes for the New Statesman is neither here nor there. Helen Thompson does too. They have both incidentally also written for Unherd.
Gray is a brilliant writer and his use, and references, of an astonishingly wide range of literature and writing make him difficult to pin down as simply conservative, or not. He is thought-provoking, challenging and utterly fascinating. I must read some Scruton properly – I’ve only read bits and pieces.
Thanks for the recommendation. I remember John Gray was interviewed by Unherd last year.
He wrote a number articles as well but seems to have parted company with Unherd unfortunately. Unless he’s on an extended break.
I think he’s still a potential contributer, just hasn’t contributed for a while
Gray is not a conservative but he is of a rare kind: an honest atheist, in that he faces up to the consequences of atheism with a clear eyed, honest intellect and takes the consequences. He always seems to have far more ire for the dishonest atheists still munching off the carcass of Christianity than he does for Christians themselves.
He sounds like Tom Holland as an atheist although Holland is a historian rather than a philosopher.
John Gray has always quite skillfully avoided being pigeon-holed as this or that – a ‘conservative’ or right winger
NS is a plural publication, not tribally ‘leftist’. But the fact they publish his pieces is still quite funny
Still in his early forties, Murray himself is not a bad choice.
Ha! Good point. Sometimes the answer lies in plain sight.
He is. What conservative would say (Telegraph, July 23rd) “while nothing is more important than the economy and economic growth, the cultural underpinnings of our country matter too.” What conservative thinks that the most important thing in the lives of nations is their economies? What conservative thinks that, while the cultures of nations matter, they do so only as well, usefully, as underpinnings? That’s more Marx than Scruton.
The remark does illustrate its own truth, of course. Considered as payable, it is a part of that economy and economic growth than which nothing is more important; while considered as thinkable, it is part of the culture that does underpin—if not the country, then its politics—called by Matthew Arnold, “philistinism”.
Edward Feser?
I was so pleased to have discovered Roger Scruton a few years ago, and had the pleasure of seeing the talks and interviews he gave before his death. Reading this tribute has energised me to re-read Fools, Frauds and Firebrands. I’m going to add his Heretics work to that list.
I can’t say I knew Roger Scruton well, but I met him a couple of times in the early 80s then again by chance in a hotel bar in Brecon in the early 90s. I knew his first wife when we were both on scholarships in Madrid.
Even when he was the coming man, in the 80s, there was something introspective, modest and diffident about him. He was certainly humourous and had the gentlest way of exposing the folly of your argument.
His conservatism,stressed the conserve, particularly the cultural traditions of the west and his deep love of rural England.
Looking back to the Conservative high water mark in the 80s and the push and shove of their doctrine, I can’t imagine that the Tories could ever have fully embraced him. Margaret Thatcher would cross a road to have an argument, Roger Scruton was discomforted, but his integrity and intellect made him speak.
As an artist, “Why Beauty Matters” was very influential for me. I would recommend it to anyone in the visual arts.
Effectively banned by the stinking BBC.
when?
Indeed, anyone with remotely conservative sympathies appears to have little companionship, often being dismissed as a bigot. This article is a lovely tribute to a great thinker.
He used to write a wonderful column in the Financial Times about rural life.
I agree, it should be essential reading. He had more knowledge and understanding of Islam than nearly all of his critics.
I have read quite a few of Scruton’s books. I always think afterwards, ‘That was great.’ But I have never wanted to read one a second time.
On the positive side, they are beautifully written but not easy – there is (for me) a little bit of a challenge. They are books to be read slowly and sipped after a meal. They are against modern trends and stick up for the good things of life, good literature for example.
On the negative side, I know that I would be revolted (yes, revolted) if I read one as a young person. These are books for people who have made it in life, not for those who are struggling to make ends meet. Scruton is a posher version of Theodore Dalrymple.
I’m inclined to disagree with you on that last point, Chris. I first came across Scruton’s work a couple of years ago when I had just left High School (in Australia) and was working as an agricultural labourer on a local farm for 10 months while saving up to go to uni, and I instantly fell in love with his books and credit him more than anyone for my current political beliefs. I think his political philosophy is actually quite positive for younger people, in that it shows the younger reader that their existence can be seen as something of a continuation of a grand cultural and political history: which is a positive and strong counterpoint to both Left-wing self-hatred and and Right-wing hyper-individualism.
I, too, shall have to disagree with you on that point, Chris. I first came upon Scruton in the early 2000s, when, indeed, life was going very well. Then came a significant crisis in my life – severe depression and much else besides. In time, it robbed me of my faith, my wife and my job. Two stays of several months in hospital – and mental health care in Ireland is primitive – added to my over all trials. In the end, philosophy saved me, first the Stoics and then others, among them a second reading of Scruton, this time with the ‘benefit’ of having suffered. His aesthetic vision and the general feel of his philosophy was, with among other things and thinkers, instrumental in my recovery. A recovery not back to the old, but to something renewed and changed. I cannot agree to all that he wrote – I should imagine that he would have distained anyone who did – but even in disagreement I can at least admire the mind in action, and sometimes the emotional disposition that drove his thought. He once defined conservatives as “those who have a love for the actual and the desire to preserve it”. Plenty of emotion there!
I’m aware the above is less and argument and more of a testimony but you might indulge me in that.
I should note, in contrast to some others here in the comments, that he was critical of Thatcher and Regan. He admired them, but was not uncritical of them.
Douglas, you are so good with words and ideas – in conversation and in print.
A heretic? Scruton? Ridiculous! You don’t get a knighthood without being a pillar of the establishment.
Strange that the gay Douglas Murray (a fine writer, whom I much admire) is such a fanboy bearing in mind that Scruton was no fan of homosexuality: he regarded homosexual acts as morally suspect on grounds of narcissism and obscenity. His denunciations of “unworthy” sexuality were ferocious, deliberately using hate-speech such as “perverted”, “disgusting” and “vile”. He would have felt at home as a hack on the Daily Mail!
For a genuinely heretical (i.e. controversially radical) view of sexual ethics, UnHerd readers might try my open access article “Childhood ‘Innocence’ is Not Ideal”, in Sexuality & Culture. A substantial section is devoted to taking issue with Scruton’s views as expressed in his book Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation. I also blog as “Heretic TOC”. Unlike Scruton’s reissued book, you get what it says on the tin.
Tom O’Carroll
Well if you dismiss someone’s entire work because of a modish leftist focus on ‘offence’ against approved groups (which of course exclude straight white men) that doesn’t sound very wise, philosophical or illuminating.
I’m gay and I really don’t care if people critique homosexuality. We need to grow up and stop screeching about being offended. Scruton has anyway a lot more to offer. Plus a hidden but much more fashionable homophobia has emerged with the woke focus on gender identity as far more important than sex.
Sorry Douglas. Wagner is a bore and Scruton was a homophobe. But these days we need to stick together……..
I heard on Radio 3 a selection of classical music pieces dear to Scruton’s heart and thought it interesting that most of them were dear to mine also. So I may give his writings on Wagner a look, it is just possible he has something intersting to say. (Original is probably to big an ask)
However Murray’s piece seems to portray Scruton as a lone voice crying into the winds of the widerness. In fact in the 1980s had a “Conservative Philisophy Group” organised by him which the Prime Minister sometimes attended, (as did Enoch Powell) a column in the Times and various other publications (I think even the Guardian gave him space) and a lectureship in Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London. His books got published. This seems rather modern actually, conservative people using their social media platforms to publicise their newspaper articles on how they are being “cancelled”, I think Scruton may have been able to see the irony here.
Douglas, you do know you have won, don’t you? You have the Brexit you always wanted, you have the complete restoration of both Class and Money totally dominating political life with juicy chunks of patronage and favours handed out to courtiers, institutions atrophied scarred and scared in the face of political power ruthlessly used. We now know what we should have already known that there is a gaping wound where our Constitution ought to be. The press is supine and the BBC and broadcast media now cowering. The Labour Party’s 2019 manifesto, in truth, promised the sort of society I was born into in the 1950s and MacMillan’s government; this was monstered as though Lenin had read it at the Finland Station; Starmer will denature the Labour Party to the point at which Money is not evenly remotely threatened.
I think Scruton would be happy with this outcome.
“Constitution?” You’re not keeping up. The left now renounces Constitutions. Although they’re now little more than a speed bump, they are a nuisance.