# Roger Scruton The most accomplished conservative philosopher of the late 20th century — and, posthumously, the patron saint of [[National Conservatism]]. Sir Roger Scruton (1944–2020) was an English philosopher of aesthetics who wrote some fifty books spanning beauty, music, architecture, wine, sex, hunting, and the meaning of conservatism; ran underground seminars for dissidents behind the Iron Curtain; and ended his life simultaneously knighted, vindicated from a hit-job scandal, and adopted as the gentle face of a nationalist movement considerably harder-edged than he was. ## Background Born in Buslingthorpe to a working-class, Labour-voting father, Scruton was converted to conservatism by watching the Paris évènements of May 1968 from a Left Bank window — repelled, he said, by the joy of educated people smashing things. Cambridge-trained in philosophy, he taught aesthetics at Birkbeck, founded the *Salisbury Review* (1982) — whose editorship made him academically radioactive — and from 1979 to 1989 helped run clandestine philosophy seminars in Prague and Brno (the "underground university"), for which the post-Communist Czech state decorated him. In 2019 a *New Statesman* interview selectively quoted him into apparent bigotry; the full recording vindicated him, the magazine apologized, and he was restored to the government housing commission he had been sacked from — months before his death in January 2020. The NatCon movement now names conference rooms for him. ## Core ideas ### Oikophilia — conservatism as love of home Scruton's master concept: **oikophilia**, love of the *oikos* (home) — the disposition to cherish and maintain the particular place, people, and institutions one inherits. Its pathological opposite, **oikophobia**, is the educated repudiation of one's own culture. Conservatism, on this account, is not an ideology but the politics of gratitude: "good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created." The frame descends from [[Edmund Burke]]'s little platoons and [[Michael Oakeshott]]'s disposition-conservatism, but Scruton gave it a warmer, more communitarian register — and an environmentalist application (*Green Philosophy*: conservation is conservatism) the movement mostly ignores. ### Aesthetics as first philosophy Scruton was by trade a philosopher of **beauty** — of music (*The Aesthetics of Music*), architecture (*The Aesthetics of Architecture*), and the sacred. His argument that beauty is a real value, that modernist architecture desecrates the built *oikos*, and that a culture's art expresses its self-understanding made him the intellectual engine of the "classical beauty" politics the vault tracks under the [[Aesthetics]] branch — including the traditional-architecture executive-order push in the US, on whose committees his admirers sat. ### The nation as first-person plural Against both liberal proceduralism and ethnic nationalism, Scruton argued political order requires a **pre-political "we"**: a territorial nation of neighbors who trust one another enough to be outvoted. This membership-before-contract argument is the philosophical core [[Yoram Hazony]] built [[National Conservatism]] on; Scruton keynoted Hazony's first NatCon conference in 2019. Whether his careful, liberal-edged nationalism survives its enlistment by harder movements is exactly the kind of reception question this vault exists to track. ## Reception on the right Scruton is claimed across the anglophone right: traditionalists for the *oikos*, NatCons for the nation, aesthetes for the beauty politics, and the broader movement for the underground-university heroism. The selective reading drops his Kantian philosophical machinery (see [[Immanuel Kant]]), his insistence that conservatism must make peace with the Enlightenment, his environmentalism, and his contempt for conspiracy and resentment politics. The distance between Scruton's "we" and the demonological "real country" of [[Charles Maurras]] is the distance between [[National Conservatism]]'s self-presentation and its riskier currents — making him, like [[Michael Oakeshott]], a control case for measuring movements against the philosophers they cite. ## Legacy in the KB context Scruton closes the vault's circuit between the [[Aesthetics]] branch and live politics (the beauty wars have a primary philosopher) and supplies [[National Conservatism]]'s most respectable foundation — which is precisely why mapping what the movement keeps and discards of him is analytically productive. With [[Edmund Burke]] and [[Michael Oakeshott]] he completes the English conservative line against which the vault's reactionaries can be measured. ## Major works - *The Meaning of Conservatism* (1980) - *The Aesthetics of Architecture* (1979) - *Sexual Desire* (1986) - *The Aesthetics of Music* (1997) - *England: An Elegy* (2000) - *Green Philosophy* (2012) - *How to Be a Conservative* (2014) ## See also - [[National Conservatism]] / [[Yoram Hazony]] — the movement that claimed him - [[Edmund Burke]] / [[Michael Oakeshott]] — the English lineage he completed - [[Aesthetics]] — the branch he anchors politically - [[Charles Maurras]] — the contrast case for nationalism's registers