The publication of Against the Tide, billed as the late Roger Scruton’s “best columns, commentaries, and criticism,” reminds us that he had spent many years ostracized from polite intellectual society before he picked up his knighthood for services to philosophy. He wrote it was “worth sacrificing your chances of becoming a fellow of the British Academy, a vice-chancellor or an emeritus-professor for the sheer relief of uttering the truth.” He was in fact elected to the British Academy. But it was indeed true that he had to go against the tide for most of his career. He was received far better abroad than at home. In one of the pieces in the collection under review, Scruton recorded his surprise at finding that he had a Brazilian fan club. Likewise, his stature has been far taller in Central Europe and the United States than in his native country.
Britain has often proved hostile territory for conservative thought. A few years ago, Scruton was interviewed by a New Statesman editor who published misleading quotes that made it seem as though Scruton had made racist remarks. The mob, including several Tory members of Parliament, swiftly denounced Scruton, and he was sacked from his role on a government advisory committee. The editor posted a picture of himself on social media drinking a bottle of champagne in celebration of Scruton’s firing. However, when the Spectator obtained the unedited transcript, it became clear that Scruton had been wronged. He had not said that Chinese people were like “robots.” Rather, he had said that the Chinese Communist Party sought to reduce people to robotic mindlessness. The apologies subsequently piled in. It is striking how often Scruton’s ideological opponents have tried to ruin his reputation — earlier in his career, he won a libel case against one of the country’s major newspapers, which was obliged to pay for his early retirement.
When one of Soren Kierkegaard’s admirers told him that he was Denmark’s greatest philosopher, Kierkegaard replied that he was Denmark’s only philosopher. It is similarly often said that Scruton was Britain’s preeminent conservative philosopher, but that is because he was its only eminent conservative philosopher. This, I think, helps explain why he faced so many character assassinations: If, in the last 20 or 30 years, one was looking to slander a conservative thinker in Britain, Scruton was one of very few prominent targets available.
Scruton began editing the Salisbury Review in 1982 because he wanted to reverse the Left’s intellectual hegemony. Apart from the Tory Spectator, the Salisbury Review was the only outright conservative magazine in the country. He soon realized that finding contributors would be hard — since few intellectuals wanted to be associated with its viewpoint. With less than 1,000 subscribers, its initial reach was pitifully small. In fact, it is possible that it was read more widely in communist Czechoslovakia through samizdat copies than in Britain itself. Despite its negligible print run, it soon became embroiled in a series of controversies regarding the role of multiculturalism in British society. The consequences for Scruton’s academic career, he never tired of pointing out, were bad.
He recalled a time in 1985 when he had been invited to give a paper to the University of Glasgow’s Philosophy Society. However, when he got there, he found out that the philosophy department had staged a protest, canceling his seminar. He thus wandered around campus in search of a room where he could give his talk unofficially, but before such a room was found, he “watched a desultory procession of apparatchiks who were conferring an honorary degree on Robert Mugabe.” Scruton’s anecdote is widely circulated because it seems to capture the hypocritical hostility conservatives face in British intellectual life. I have heard it myself several times and seen it retold in books and magazines. But it never happened. Mugabe never received anything from the University of Glasgow. Perhaps Scruton misremembered: In 1984, the University of Edinburgh bestowed Mugabe with an honorary degree, which was subsequently revoked.
Nonetheless, it is remarkable that Scruton should rouse such antagonism. He spent most of his time pottering about in rural England with little to no influence on public policy. His main output consisted of essays on aesthetics, books on Richard Wagner’s operas, and the history of philosophy — hardly the face of harsh right-wing ideology. Scruton was essentially a harmless soul, whose breadth of learning was impossible not to envy. Most pieces collected in Against the Tide are too short to showcase the real extent of his encyclopedic erudition. Yet it contains some fine essays on Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, Noam Chomsky, and some continental philosophers he considered “charlatans of the first-order.” Thus he writes that Hans-Georg Gadamer and Louis Althusser “provide to the intellectually balding a dashing wig of long hair.”
Undoubtedly Scruton’s finest moments were in the 1980s, when he traveled to Central Europe to teach underground seminars in philosophy. He found that philosophy offered his students the opportunity to safeguard the inner freedoms of intellectual life that the state’s leaden propaganda tried to crush. He helped them reconnect with Europe’s cultural heritage by teaching them Greek literature, German philosophy, and the operas of Wagner and Verdi. He was merely one of many professors who participated in this covert organization, but he showed real bravery. The Czechoslovakian police eventually arrested him and booted him out of the country. Meanwhile, the secret services in Poland and Hungary had him followed. When the Cold War ended, Scruton received state honors from Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary.
Even his fans must concede that Scruton was a terrific crank — but crankiness, in the right dosage, can be very funny indeed. In one of the previously unpublished texts, he relates that he took his son Sam to clean the verges near his house in the countryside. “This is a task,” Scruton reflects, “that the local council — weighed down as it is with schemes to introduce diversity into the fire brigade and multiculturalism into the municipal swimming pool — can no longer afford to perform.”
One of Scruton’s shortcomings, both as an essayist and thinker, was that he never said anything unexpected. He was the kind of man whose political views were evident just by the way he dressed. Indeed, perhaps the most surprising thing about him was that he liked Metallica. He seems to have tried, successfully, to become the perfect cliche of the fusty conservative intellectual. I never read a book of his whose main premises I could not guess already before I picked it up.
And yet, Scruton’s predictability does not entail that he is unpleasant to read. One of the best pieces in the collection under review comes from the wine column he used to write for the New Statesman. It is a good-humored polemic against screwtop wine bottles. He writes that “thanks to the cork, wine stands aloof from the world of getting and spending, a moral resource that we conjure with a pop.” By contrast, the screwtop “gives way at once, allowing no ritual of presentation and no sacramental sound effects. It deforms the bottle with metallic shards: imagine a still life with opened screwtop — impossible.” While the cork invites us to a ritual of shared pleasure, the screwtop “encourages the quick fix, the hasty glug, the purely self-centred grab for a slug of alcohol.” He ends his polemic by assuring that “there are no screwtops in Scrutopia.”
Just as Scruton was regularly unfairly maligned by the Left, he was baselessly overpraised by the Right. Mark Dooley, Scruton’s literary executor, writes in the introduction that Scruton’s “courage in defence of unpopular causes” puts him right next to George Orwell as a journalist who “never settled for the easy life.” Dooley thus showcases one of the irritating tendencies that Scruton’s fans routinely indulge in: exaggerating his virtues. Orwell lived in poverty most of his life and caught a bullet in the neck fighting against Francisco Franco’s fascists. By contrast, Scruton’s greatest professional blow resulted not from his truth-telling but from his writing pro-smoking articles for newspapers while on the payroll of Japan Tobacco International. Dooley, somehow, elides that fact.
Scruton wrote that he had “offered a lifetime of intellectual support” to the Conservative Party. But partisan commitments, to my mind, seldom benefit intellectuals — in fact, it tends to mar their thinking. Scruton’s own writings were often thus compromised. It is sometimes said that he represented traditional conservatism, as opposed to Thatcherite neoliberalism. In point of fact, he offered his full support to Margaret Thatcher’s premiership. He repeatedly criticized left-wing intellectuals for siding with political oppression, yet he congratulated Thatcher for her tough stance in Northern Ireland. He even compared her to Pericles. Moreover, he wrote an unequivocal apologia for Joseph McCarthy’s inquisitorial tactics.
There is a thoroughgoing tendency in Scruton’s writings to overstate the strength of his own case. It is most evident in his political columns, but it creeps in everywhere. Even some of his best works, such as his books on Wagner, are not free from it. Scruton mounted a defense of the Ring cycle, trying to isolate it from Wagner’s personal antisemitism. One may indeed think that Wagner never let his own prejudices into his works. Scruton is not the only scholar to have thought so. But it is a marginal position: The case that Wagner consciously or subconsciously put antisemitic themes into his operas is far stronger than Scruton allowed. He thus let polemical rhetoric usurp his enviable erudition.
One can understand much of Scruton’s conservatism by reading Part V of Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen by W.B. Yeats, which begins:
Come let us mock at the great
That had such burdens on the mind
And toiled so hard and late
To leave some monument behind,
Nor thought of the levelling wind.
Scruton echoes this anti-irreverent sentiment in one of his essays, “The Conservative Conscience,” written for the Salisbury Review in 1994. Therein, he calls for “saints and heroes” to step forth to promote culture, literature, and “the pure truths of the Christian religion.” The essay is on the level of pamphlets one might receive from the neighborhood proselytizer. It is full of cliches (“We live in troubling times,” etc.) and warnings that godless, promiscuous hedonists threaten the Christian way of life. He blames “trivializing materialists and sarcastic cynics” for frightening these “saints and heroes” into silence by covering them in ridicule. He writes that “the best is always mocked by that which feels condemned by it.” The problem for Scruton is that irreverence is inescapable in open societies. It is to his credit that he, unlike some of his readers, never gave up trying to reconcile traditionalism with liberalism.
Gustav Jönsson is a Swedish freelance writer based in the United Kingdom.
