Published Jan. 16, 2020 : Roger Scruton, a Provocative Public Intellectual, Dies at 75

 

Roger Scruton, a Provocative Public Intellectual, Dies at 75

 

A philosopher, author and columnist, he was an outspoken hero to conservatives in Britain and recently at the center of, in his words, a “hate storm.”

 

By Alan Cowell

Published Jan. 16, 2020

Updated Jan. 17, 2020

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/16/books/roger-scruton-dead.html

 

LONDON — Roger Scruton, a prominent British philosopher and public intellectual whose espousal of conservative causes and contentious views elicited both plaudits and opprobrium, which he likened to “falling to the bottom in my own country,” died on Sunday. He was 75.

 

His family announced the death on his website without providing other details. Mr. Scruton, who lived for many years on a farm in Wiltshire, in southwest England, was said to have been treated for lung cancer in recent months.

 

In the course of a long academic career, which included spells in the United States, Mr. Scruton wrote more than 50 books, ranging over topics like art, aesthetics, architecture, music, philosophy and sexual behavior. On the defining issue of the new century in Britain, he said, he voted in favor of leaving the European Union, the so-called Brexit that propelled the Conservative Party’s landslide victory in elections in December.

 

He also wrote four novels in addition to newspaper and magazine columns, in which he mused on wine, politics and horseback hunting, which he pursued enthusiastically until his final birthday. As a musician, he composed operas. He qualified as a barrister, too, but did not practice law.

 

In the Cold War years of the late 1970s and ’80s, he transcended the frontiers of formal Western academia by traveling beyond the Iron Curtain — to Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia — to deliver clandestine lectures and smuggle samizdat works disguised as blank CDs to Soviet bloc students. In later years he was awarded medals in recognition of that role.

 

He was knighted in Britain in 2016. After his death, Prime Minister Boris Johnson tweeted, “We have lost the greatest modern conservative thinker — who not only had the guts to say what he thought but said it beautifully.”

 

Toward the end of his life, Mr. Scruton concluded that he had been treated unfairly in his own land, subjected to what he termed a “hate storm” inspired by critics who had accused him of Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and disparagement of Chinese people — allegations that Mr. Scruton called “fantastic and fabricated.”

 

The immediate cause of the furor was an article about him in April in the left-wing magazine New Statesman. Based on an interview with him, the article, which a New Statesman editor said on social media contained “a series of outrageous remarks,” prompted an uproar. Mr. Scruton was said to have belittled the term Islamophobia, spoken stereotypically of Chinese people and evoked a “Soros empire in Hungary,” referring to the financier George Soros, who is Jewish.

 

Within hours of its publication Mr. Scruton was sacked from an unsalaried position he had held as the head of a government-appointed body that advised on modern architecture, the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission.

 

But he was reappointed after the magazine acknowledged that his views “were not accurately represented in the tweets” that had been published along with the article. The magazine apologized.

 

The episode recalled Mr. Scruton’s longstanding reputation as an iconoclast. Peter Stothard, who had been his editor at The Times of London in the 1980s, when Mr. Scruton wrote a column for the paper on art and politics, was quoted as saying that “there was no one I ever commissioned to write whose articles provoked more rage” than Mr. Scruton’s.

 

Critics also assailed his views on homosexuality and gender issues. In his interview with New Statesman, he said that homosexuality was “different” but denied that he was homophobic. He described the 21st-century debate on gender and identity as “a kind of theatrical obsession which is being imposed on children whether or not they understand it.”

 

Mr. Scruton dated his conversion to the conservative cause to the Paris student riots of 1968, when, at 24, he observed young people, including his friends, clashing with the police in the Latin Quarter. “What I saw was an unruly mob of self-indulgent middle-class hooligans,” he said in an interview with The Guardian in 2000.

 

“When I asked my friends what they wanted, what were they trying to achieve, all I got back was this ludicrous Marxist gobbledygook,” he continued. “I was disgusted by it, and thought there must be a way back to the defense of western civilization against these things. That’s when I became a conservative. I knew I wanted to conserve things rather than pull them down.”

 

Roger Vernon Scruton was born in Buslingthorpe, a village in Lincolnshire, in eastern England, on Feb. 7, 1944, the son of John and Beryl (Claris) Scruton. His father was a teacher, his mother a homemaker. The couple also had two daughters.

 

Roger was educated at a grammar school in High Wycombe, West London, and won a scholarship to Jesus College at Cambridge University, where he studied philosophy. He met his future first wife, Danielle Laffitte, a teacher, while traveling in France. They married in 1973, the same year he was awarded his doctorate. They divorced in 1979.

 

From 1971 to 1992 he taught at Birkbeck College in London, where, he said, he was the only conservative on the teaching staff.

 

In later years he was sometimes depicted as providing the intellectual spine to Thatcherism in Britain, although he said he did not share Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s devotion to the free market.

 

In 1982, Mr. Scruton helped found a conservative journal, The Salisbury Review, which stirred controversy in 1984 by publishing an article by a headmaster in the north of England who raised questions about the value of multicultural education.

 

Mr. Scruton published a torrent of books, including “Art and Imagination: A Study in the Philosophy of the Mind” (1974), “The Aesthetics of Architecture” (1979) and “Sexual Desire” (1986). His novels included “Notes From Underground” (2014), based on his experiences behind the Iron Curtain.

 

In 1992 he became a professor of philosophy at Boston University; he returned to Britain in 1995. In 1996 he married Sophie Jeffreys, an architectural historian, with whom he had two children, Sam and Lucy. They all survive him.

 

The episode revolving around the New Statesman article, in the last year of his life, left Mr. Scruton feeling bruised.

 

In a column in the conservative magazine Spectator, under the headline “Roger Scruton: My 2019,” he wrote, “During this year much was taken from me — my reputation, my standing as a public intellectual, my position in the Conservative movement, my peace of mind, my health.”

 

But, he went on, “Falling to the bottom in my own country, I have been raised to the top elsewhere, and looking back over the sequence of events I can only be glad that I have lived long enough to see this happen.”

 

“Coming close to death you begin to know what life means,” he added, “and what it means is gratitude.”

 

After a long career as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times based in Africa, the Middle East and Europe, Alan Cowell became a freelance contributor in 2015, based in London.

 

  More about Alan Cowell