Philosopher of a ‘Humane and Moderate Politics’
The Editors
National Review Online
In May 1968, visiting his girlfriend in Paris, Roger Scruton, age 24, watched from an apartment window as students overturned cars and lampposts and threw stones at police. For seven weeks the civil unrest raged, paralyzing France. “That’s when I became a conservative,” he observed years later. “I knew I wanted to conserve things rather than pull them down.”
Scruton soon found himself in good though embattled company, as across the Western world dissenters from the Spirit of 1968 compared notes. A countermovement began to form. By the early 1980s the fruit of its efforts could be found in the Thatcher government and the Reagan administration. Scruton, who had written his dissertation on aesthetics and received his Ph.D. from Cambridge in 1973, was teaching at Birkenbeck College, London, when he published his third book, The Meaning of Conservatism (1980), which met with furrowed brows among his left-leaning academic peers. He had already helped found a dining club called the Conservative Philosophy Group. In 1982 the founders of The Salisbury Review named him its first editor, trusting him to advance a more traditional, cultural conservatism than that preferred by certain Thatcherites who stressed free-market economics. Good-bye, academe.
Thus liberated, Scruton went on a tear.
