Roger Scruton

Roger Scruton was born in Lincolnshire in 1944 and studied philosophy at Cambridge. He said that witnessing the student protests in Paris in May 1968 turned him toward conservatism. He taught at Birkbeck College in London from 1971 to 1992, later held posts in the United States and the UK, and wrote more than 50 books on topics including aesthetics, music, architecture, sexuality, wine, religion and political philosophy, among them The Meaning of Conservatism (1980) and How to Be a Conservative (2014). He edited The Salisbury Review from 1982 to 2001, wrote columns for national newspapers, and co-chaired a government commission on housing design from 2018. He was knighted in 2016 for services to philosophy, teaching and public education, and died in January 2020 after treatment for cancer.

Admirers, including Conservative politicians and anti-communist dissidents in Central Europe, regarded Scruton as a leading conservative philosopher; he received honours from the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary. Critics on the left accused him of hostile views toward gay people, Muslims and others, citing his opposition to same-sex adoption and comments made in interviews. In 2019 he was dismissed as a government housing adviser after a New Statesman interview; after a fuller recording showed that context had been omitted, the magazine apologised and he was reappointed. Some architects who disagreed with him described him as a courteous opponent in debate.