Roger Scruton

Roger Scruton
Born	(1944-02-27)February 27, 1944
Nationality	British
Education	MA, PhD (Cantab)
Alma mater	Jesus College, Cambridge
Occupation(s)	Philosopher, writer
Employer(s)	American Enterprise Institute, University of Oxford, University of St Andrews
Known for	Founding editor of The Salisbury Review
Television	Why Beauty Matters (BBC, 2009)
Movement	Traditionalist conservatism
Spouse	Sophie Scruton
Children	One son, one daughter
Parent(s)	Jack Scruton and Beryl Claris
Website	roger-scruton.com

Roger Vernon Scruton (born 27 February 1944) is a British philosopher and writer. He is the author of many books on philosophy, including *A Short History of Modern Philosophy (1982) *A Dictionary Of Political Thought (1982, 2007) *Kant (1983) *Thinkers Of The New Left (1985) *Sexual Desire: A Moral Philosophy of the Erotic (1986) *Spinoza (1987,1998) *Modern Philosophy (1994) *Animal Rights and Wrongs (1996,2006) *On Hunting (1998) *The West and the Rest: Globalisation and the Terrorist Threat (2002) *Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged (2007) *A Political Philosophy: Arguments For Conservatism (2006) *The Uses of Pessimism: And the Danger of False Hope (2010). In addition to collections of his essays, he has also published two volumes of autobiography, numerous books on the philosophy of aesthetics, several novels, and two operas.

From 1971 to 1992 he was a lecturer and subsequently reader and professor of aesthetics at Birkbeck College, London. In 1982 he was one of the founders of The Salisbury Review, a conservative political journal, which he edited for 18 years. He has written numerous articles on a range of topics from a conservative perspective. He first embraced conservatism during the student protests of May 1968 in France:

"When I asked my friends what they wanted, what were they trying to achieve, all I got back was this ludicrous Marxist gobbledegook. I was disgusted by it, and thought there must be a way back to the defence of Western civilisation against these things. That's when I became a conservative. I knew I wanted to conserve things rather than pull them down."

A.C. Grayling described Scruton in 2000 as a "wonderful teacher of philosophy". In 2009–2010 he was a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. In January 2010 he was appointed visiting professor of æsthetics at the University of Oxford for three years, and in spring 2011 he takes up a quarter-time professorial fellowship in moral philosophy at the University of St Andrews.

Education and career

Scruton and his two sisters were born to Jack Scruton, a teacher, and his wife Beryl Claris, and raised in Marlow and High Wycombe. Scruton told The Guardian that Jack was from a working-class Manchester family — he hated the upper class and loved the countryside — and Beryl was fond of romantic fiction and entertaining "blue-rinsed friends". Although his parents had been raised as Christians they saw themselves as humanists, so his home was a religion-free zone. Family life was not particularly happy, and he had more or less left home by the time he was 16.

He was educated at Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe (1954–1961), where he, deliberately, failed to fit in, and from which he was expelled shortly after winning a scholarship to Cambridge: "The headmaster had wanted to throw me out for a while but he recognised that I was good for the statistics. We put on this play and he came and saw the stage on fire with a half-naked girl on it. His solution was to expel me." He studied moral sciences (philosophy) at Jesus College, Cambridge (1962–1969), receiving a BA in 1965, incepted as MA in 1967, and was awarded a PhD in 1972, also from Cambridge, for a thesis on aesthetics.

He worked as a research fellow at Peterhouse, Cambridge from 1969 to 1971. From 1971 to 1992 he was a lecturer and subsequently reader and professor of aesthetics at Birkbeck College, London. He also studied law at the Inns of Court, and was called to the Bar in 1978, though he never practiced. From 1992 to 1995 he was professor of philosophy at Boston University.

From 1982 to 2001 he was founding editor of The Salisbury Review. He founded the Claridge Press, which in early 2004 he sold to Continuum International Publishing Group. He remains on The Salisbury Review's editorial board, as well as those of the British Journal of Aesthetics and openDemocracy.net. He has published several novels and short stories, and has written two operas, for which he provided both the libretto and music. His first opera, The Minister, was performed in Quenington in 1994 and in Oxford in 1998. His second opera, Violet, based on the life of the harpsichordist Violet Gordon-Woodhouse, was performed twice in London in 2005.

Philosophical and political views

Work in philosophy

Scruton's first published book Art and Imagination (1974) explores aesthetics. Thinkers of the New Left (1985) draws together a collection of essays written by Scruton and originally published in the Salisbury Review in which he criticizes fourteen prominent intellectuals, amongst whom are Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Jean-Paul Sartre, Antonio Gramsci and various members of the Frankfurt School. He says that what is most interesting and true in these writers is "detachable from the ideology that has provided their fashionable appeal". He has written a dictionary of political philosophy, and two general surveys of modern philosophy. From Descartes to Wittgenstein, later republished as A Short History of Modern Philosophy, and Modern Philosophy, a more detailed, topic-based survey. Scruton contends, following Immanuel Kant, that human beings have a transcendental dimension, a sacred core exhibited in their capacity for self-reflection. A persistent theme in his work is an interest in, and defence of, the achievements of European high culture.

Conservatism

Scruton holds Burkean political views. He wrote in 2006: "My conservatism arose in reaction to May 1968 in France. It is an English reaction to continental posturing and is as rooted in high culture and highbrow books as the mumbo-jumbo of Althusser, Deleuze and Guattari." In The Meaning of Conservatism (1980) he sought to shift the emphasis of the Right away from economics towards moral issues, describing it later as "a somewhat Hegelian defence of Tory values in the face of their betrayal by the free marketeers." Scruton uses the term oikophobia to refer to a disposition to reject the traditional values of ones community, arguing that Derrida and others engage in an "assault on 'bourgeois' society result[ing] in an 'anti-culture' that took direct aim at holy and sacred things, condemning and repudiating them as oppressive and power-ridden." According to Mark Dooley, in Roger Scruton: Philosopher on Dover Beach, Scruton argues that,

Derrida is a classic oikophobe in so far as he repudiates the longing for home that the Western theological, legal, and literary traditions satisfy. . . . Derrida's deconstruction seeks to block the path to this 'core experience' of membership, preferring instead a rootless existence founded 'upon nothing.'

An extreme aversion to the sacred and the thwarting of the connection of the sacred to the culture of the West is described as the underlying motif of oikophobia; and not the substitution of Judeo-Christianity by another coherent system of belief. The paradox of the oikophobe seems to be that any opposition directed at the theological and cultural tradition of the West is to be encouraged even if it is "significantly more parochial, exclusivist, patriarchal, and ethnocentric."

Activism in support of dissidents

From 1979, Scruton was an active supporter of dissidents in Czechoslovakia when the country was under the rule of the Communist Party. Inspired by Kathy Wilkes, whom he eulogized in England: An Elegy, he participated in the "underground university" set up by the dissidents. In 1980 in Oxford, he co-founded the Jan Hus Educational Foundation, which continues to work in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and served as trustee. Since 1990 he has been a board member of the Civic Institute in Prague. For his services to the Czech people, he received the 1st June Prize of the City of Plzeň in 1996 and the Medal for Merit, First Class of the Czech Republic in 2000. He was also co-founder and trustee of the Jagiellonian Trust, working in Poland and Hungary from 1982 until the return of democracy in 1989, and founder and trustee of the Anglo-Lebanese Cultural Association, working for reconciliation between the Lebanese sects from 1987 until it was disbanded in 1995, after the occupation of Lebanon by Syria.

Peter Hitchens writes of Scruton's acts in Eastern Europe before the fall of the Berlin Wall, "I have a great deal of admiration for Roger Scruton and some others known to me who, unrecognized here [the United Kingdom], took considerable risks in those sinister places to try to bring freedom". Scruton has expressed regret at how certain aspects of East European society have developed since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Views on sexual desire

Jonathan Dollimore writes that Scruton's Sexual Desire (1986) attempts to base a conservative sexual ethic on the Hegelian proposition that "the final end of every rational being is the building of the self—of a recognizable personal entity, which flourishes according to its own autonomous nature." This involves recognizing the other as an end in itself. Scruton argued that the major feature of perversion is "sexual release that avoids or abolishes the other," which he saw as narcissistic and solipsistic. Desire directed at the other sex elicits the experience of otherness. He argues that homosexuality is a perversion because it has no fundamental experience of otherness. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum argued that Scruton does not apply his principle of otherness equally—for example, to sexual relationships between adults and children. Mark Dooley writes that Scruton's objective is to show that sexual desire trades in "the currency of the sacred."

In an essay, "Sexual morality and the liberal consensus" (1989), Scruton wrote that certain people of any generation are attracted to their own sex, but he defended the prohibition and avoidance of homosexual acts on the grounds that a "sublimated interest in the young" exists amongst some priests, teachers, scout-masters, and others. In an article written in The Sunday Telegraph in 1989 he argued that it was important to instill in children feelings of revulsion toward homosexuality. Commenting on this and the 1989 essay, Martin Stafford wrote that the thesis which Scruton expressed in these pieces could be summarized as follows: because gays have no children, and therefore no interest in society, they can indulge themselves carnally without restraint; only by sublimating those desires could they acquire a stake in society. Contrasting this with his earlier writings, Stafford argues that these views display a "striking incongruity" with the "sober reflections" exhibited in his Sexual Desire. In an article in The Daily Telegraph in 2007, Scruton argues against the assumption that homosexuals should have a right to adopt children: "Every now and then ... we wake up to the fact that, although homosexuality has been normalised, it is not normal." In a Guardian interview in June 2010 Scruton said of his earlier essay:

I took the view that feeling repelled by something might have a justification, even if it's not a justification that the person themselves can give. Like, we're all repelled by incest—well, not all, but most people are. And there's a perfectly good justification, if you look at it in terms of the long-term interest of society. And in that essay I experimented with the view that maybe something similar can be said about homosexuality. And I don't now agree with that, because I think that—it's such a complicated thing, homosexuality. It's not one thing, anyway. So I wouldn't stand by what I said then.

Views on wine

From 2001 to 2009, Scruton wrote a wine column for the New Statesman, and he has made contributions to The World of Fine Wine and the 2007 publication Questions of Taste: The Philosophy of Wine with his essay "The Philosophy of Wine". The book I Drink Therefore I am: A Philosopher's Guide to Wine, in part composed of material published in his New Statesman column, was published in 2009.

Debates

In March 2007 in London Scruton debated with Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and A. C. Grayling on the topic "Are We Better Off Without Religion?" In March 2009, at the Royal Geographical Society, seconding the historian David Starkey, Scruton proposed the motion: "Britain has become indifferent to beauty" by holding an image of Botticelli's The Birth of Venus next to an image of the British supermodel Kate Moss, to demonstrate how British perceptions of beauty had declined to the "level of our crudest appetites and our basest needs".

Personal life, business and other interests

Scruton married Danielle Laffitte in 1973, and the couple divorced in 1979. He married Sophie Jeffreys, an architectural historian, in 1996, and they have two children. In the early 1990s he moved to the countryside and discovered a passion for fox hunting with hounds, and now lives with his family on their farm in Brinkworth, Wiltshire. They own an 18-century house, Montpelier, near Sperryville, Virginia, and Scruton also has an apartment in Albany, an apartment building on Piccadilly, London.

He reports that he has been the founder of four companies. In 1982 he set up Claridge Press Ltd, a publisher, later sold to Continuum International. In 1990 he founded Central European Consulting to offer business advice in post-communist Central Europe. In 1999 he set up Horsell's Farm Enterprises Ltd, a consultancy firm. Clients include Japan Tobacco International (JTI)—who sell Camel, Winston, and Salem cigarettes—for whom Scruton and his wife edited and produced The Risk of Freedom briefing, published quarterly from October 1999 to April 2006. Other clients include Somerfield Stores, advised about establishing a line of local produce, and opendemocracy.net, a political website. In 2004 he set up Montpelier Strategy LLC in the U.S. in connection with the property he purchased in Virginia. He is also a trustee of the Educational Research Trust.

In January 2002 Kevin Maguire and Julian Borger reported in The Guardian that Scruton had asked JTI for an increased salary to place pro-smoking articles in several newspapers and magazines. An October 2001 e-mail to a JTI executive was allegedly leaked to the journalists (though Scruton claims it was stolen), and showed Scruton requesting the increase; it also discussed his aim of getting opinion pieces published in several high-profile newspapers on what the e-mail called "major topics of current concern" to the tobacco industry. As a result of the article, The Financial Times, one of the newspapers mentioned in the e-mail, ended Scruton's contract with them as a weekly columnist on issues related to country life. The Wall Street Journal, for whom Scruton had written regularly since 1996, also said it had suspended his contributions for having failed to disclose his relationship with JTI.

In response, Scruton objected to The Guardian's use of a leaked email, which he said had been stolen, and said he had never concealed his connection with JTI, which had started three years earlier. He also told the newspaper the new proposal was never acted upon. After the story appeared, he was criticized in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) for having failed to declare his relationship with JTI when he wrote a 65-page pamphlet, "WHO, What and Why" (2000), for the Institute of Economic Affairs, a British think tank, about the World Health Organization's (WHO) campaign against smoking— the pamphlet criticized the WHO for focusing on tobacco instead of vaccination campaigns and diseases. He wrote an editorial along similar lines for the European edition of The Wall Street Journal, and his arguments were picked up by The Times and The Scotsman in what the BMJ said appeared to be a pro-tobacco campaign. According to The New York Times, Scruton did not tell the Institute for Economic Affairs that he was receiving an income from JTI.

Scruton told the BMJ that he wrote the pamphlet because of his long-standing concerns about legislative powers being transferred to transnational institutions, not with the aim of exonerating tobacco; he acknowledged that, with hindsight, he should have declared an interest.

Publications

Nonfiction

• Art And Imagination (1974)
• The Aesthetics Of Architecture (1979)
• The Meaning Of Conservatism (1980)
• The Politics Of Culture and Other Essays (1981)
• A Short History of Modern Philosophy (1982)
• A Dictionary Of Political Thought (1982, 2007)
• The Aesthetic Understanding (1983)
• Kant (1983)
• Untimely Tracts (1985)
• Thinkers Of The New Left (1985)
• Sexual Desire: A Moral Philosophy of the Erotic (1986)
• Spinoza (1987)
• A Land Held Hostage: Lebanon and the West (1987)
• The Philosopher On Dover Beach and Other Essays (1990)
• Conservative Texts (1992)
• Modern Philosophy (1994)
• The Classical Vernacular: architectural principles in an age of nihilism (1995)
• Animal Rights and Wrongs (1996)
• An Intelligent Person's Guide To Philosophy (1996) Republished in 2005 as Philosophy: Principles and Problems
• The Aesthetics Of Music (1997)
• An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture (1998)
• On Hunting (1998)
• Spinoza (1998)
• The West and the Rest: Globalisation and the terrorist threat (2002)
• Death-Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner's Tristan und Isolde (2004)
• News From Somewhere: On Settling (2004)
• The Need for Nations (2004)
• Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life (2005)
• Animal Rights and Wrongs (2006)
• A Political Philosophy: Arguments For Conservatism (2006)
• Immigration, Multiculturalism and the Need to Defend the Nation State - Online version (2006)
• England: An Elegy (2006)
• Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged (2007)
• Beauty (2009)
• I Drink Therefore I am: A Philosopher's Guide to Wine (2009)
• The Uses of Pessimism: And the Danger of False Hope (2010)

Fiction

• Fortnight's Anger: a novel (1981)
• Francesca: a novel (1991)
• A Dove Descending and Other Stories (1991)
• Xanthippic Dialogues (1993)
• Perictione in Colophon (2000)

Opera

• The Minister (1994)
• Violet (2005)

Television

• Why Beauty Matters (BBC 2009)

See also

Jan Hus

External links

• Roger Scruton's website, accessed 5 September 2010.
• Profile at American Enterprise Institute website
• The Salisbury Review Quarterly official site
• Roger Scruton wine articles for the New Statesman