Passion, authority and the odd mini-rant: Scruton’s conservative vision

Roger Scruton is that rarest of things: a first-rate philosopher who actually has a philosophy. Unfortunately at times for him, that philosophy is a conservative one. But his personal loss has been our great collective gain. As his new book again demonstrates, over the years his has been one of the few intellectually authoritative voices in modern British conservatism.

In 1980, at the outset of the Thatcher decade, Scruton wrote The Meaning of Conservatism, a book which reportedly blighted his academic career: it remains an embarrassment to the British Academy that he was not made a Fellow until 2008.

Academia may be softening at last, as his various professorships at Oxford and St Andrews testify. Yet living by his wits has not served him so badly. Over four decades he has poured out more than 30 works, including monographs on aesthetics, architecture, music and sexual desire, textbooks, studies of great thinkers such as Kant and Spinoza, reflections on Islam, England and nationalism, as well as journalism, reviews, an autobiography, two novels, two operas and a defence of hunting.