Roger Scruton 1944 – 2020
Roger Scruton (1944 – 2020) was a British philosopher of the Contemporary era, associated with Political Philosophy and Analytic Philosophy.
Roger Scruton was a British philosopher, public intellectual, and the foremost philosophical exponent of conservative thought in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The Meaning of Conservatism set out a Hegelian and Burkean defense of inherited institutions, custom, and the bonds of place, while his Aesthetics of Music, Beauty, and his many essays on architecture argued for the moral and political significance of the aesthetic. He held chairs at Birkbeck and Buckingham, and remained, until his death, a tireless defender of the high cultural inheritance of Europe against what he took to be the cultural relativism of his time.
Roger Vernon Scruton was born at Buslingthorpe in Lincolnshire in February 1944, the son of an austere schoolmaster, and grew up in High Wycombe. He went up to Jesus College, Cambridge, as a state-aided scholar, read natural sciences and then moral sciences, and took his doctorate in 1972 with a thesis on aesthetics. He taught at Birkbeck College London from 1971 to 1992, founded The Salisbury Review in 1982, and held later visiting appointments at Boston University, the American Enterprise Institute, Buckingham, St Andrews, and Oxford.
His books include Art and Imagination (1974), The Aesthetics of Architecture (1979), The Meaning of Conservatism (1980), Sexual Desire (1986), A Short History of Modern Philosophy (1981), Modern Philosophy (1994), An Intelligent Person's Guide to Philosophy (1996), England: An Elegy (2000), The Aesthetics of Music (1997), The Soul of the World (2014), How to Be a Conservative (2014), and the memoir Gentle Regrets (2005).
From the 1980s Scruton ran a clandestine network smuggling philosophy and forbidden books into Czechoslovakia, an activity for which he was awarded the Czech Medal of Merit in 1998. His philosophical work combined a Kantian aesthetics with a Burkean conservatism centred on attachment to place, custom, and inherited form, and made him the most articulate British defender of cultural conservatism of his generation. He was knighted in 2016 and died at Malmesbury in January 2020.
Key facts
- Nationality
- British
- Era
- Contemporary
- Movements
- Political Philosophy, Analytic Philosophy
Selected quotes
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Attributed to Roger Scruton:
“Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder; it is in the world that the beholder loves.”
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Attributed to Roger Scruton:
“Conservatism is the philosophy of attachment.”
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Attributed to Roger Scruton:
“The most important things in life are inherited, not chosen.”
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“Culture is the way a society confronts the eternal questions: who we are, where we come from, and what we owe each other.”
A civilization is a social entity that manifests religious, political , legal, and customary uniformity over an extended period, and which confers on its members the benefits of socially accumulated knowledge. -
Attributed to Roger Scruton:
“To love a thing is also to wish to defend it.”
Roger Scruton by topic
Frequently asked about Roger Scruton
- When did Roger Scruton live?
- Roger Scruton was born in 1944 and died in 2020.
- Where was Roger Scruton from?
- Roger Scruton was a British philosopher of the Contemporary era.
- What philosophical movements is Roger Scruton associated with?
- Roger Scruton was associated with Political Philosophy and Analytic Philosophy.
- What was Roger Scruton known for?
- Roger Scruton was a British philosopher, public intellectual, and the foremost philosophical exponent of conservative thought in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
- How many quotes are attributed to Roger Scruton?
- There are 15 attributed quotations from Roger Scruton in the 1001Philosophers collection, organized by topic.