![]() All good in society, then, flows from the bottom up, rather than from the top down. Taking Edmund Burke and Adam Smith as his exemplars in thought, Scruton’s traditionalist conservatism always revolved around his love of place and the need for real and organic community, held together by habit, custom, and experience. “The ideal democratic government is one that goes from year to year without passing a single Act,” Scruton claimed. ![]() For Scruton, this was all to Salisbury’s great honor. He did little to change things, and thus did little by which to be remembered. Scruton, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, upheld the conservatism of Lord Salisbury, noting that the long-serving English prime minister was hardly remembered. “At least once a day, usually when I am fed up with writing, towards the end of the morning, I walk around the farm just to reassure myself that it really does exist and I really do own it.” At that point, Scruton had owned Scrutopia for 17 years, and he never failed “to congratulate myself on the state of the pond and the extent of the wildlife.” Then the day simply unfolds from there,” he explained in 2012. ![]() He spent as much time as he could on his farm, Scrutopia: “Routinely I get up and go straight to my desk at about 7am, to write. Still, whatever arguments he started and finished, Scruton loved the quiet life. Commenting on his own experiences with the Evil Empire in the 1980s, Scruton wrote of himself, perhaps seeing something of McCarthy in there, “He refused to lie down in the coffin that the communists provided.” Communism, Scruton insisted until the end of his days, was a “dark force…a kind of negation of humanity.” Specifically, communism existed to crush the human soul and remove the spark of life and creativity from the world, mechanizing all things. In this endeavor, at least, Scruton resoundingly failed. In 1991, Scruton even tried to rehabilitate the reputation of Senator Joseph McCarthy, noting that the anti-communist from Wisconsin might not have possessed tact, but he did know evil when it saw it. He never backed down from a good fight, and, with wit and wisdom, he relished all opposition. Though Scruton arrived consciously at conservatism during the French student uprising of 1968, he honed it in his journal, The Salisbury Review, which he founded in 1982, in the homes of Czech dissidents in the first half of the 1980s, and through his many books, columns, and debates. Following in the footsteps of Christopher Dawson, Etienne Gilson, and other prominent intellects, Scruton gave the prestigious Gifford Lectures in 2010, and Queen Elizabeth knighted him in 2016. Like Chesterton, he loved wine and tobacco. As a man of letters, he was the most successful Englishman since G.K. He was, by almost every measure, the most important, influential, and articulate spokesman for a humane and traditional conservatism since the passing Russell Kirk in 1994 and Robert Nisbet in 1996. Scruton seems to have been excellent at everything he tried, gaining a massive following throughout the English-speaking world and post-1989 Eastern Europe. In addition to writing roughly 50 books of cultural criticism and serious philosophy, European communists expelled him from the Eastern Bloc in the mid-1980s after proclaiming him an “undesirable person,” the Pet Shop Boys once sued him for libel in the 1990s, and, in 2005, the Guildhall School of Music and Drama performed his full opera, “Violet.” Scruton passed away this past Sunday, January 12, after a six-month battle with cancer. No one in their right mind could accuse English philosopher Roger Scruton of having lived a timid or a quiet life.
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