Free Republic

Roger Scruton passed away on Sunday, January 12, 2020. Scruton was among the most original and perceptive conservative thinkers of our time. In over forty books and countless articles and posts, he worked to defend the ideas of national sovereignty, individual privacy, religious culture, and human freedom. His death is a great loss to conservatism and to the cause of freedom in general. Among Scruton's best known books are An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture; The West and the Rest; and Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life. In these and so many other books, he presented a coherent vision...

Sir Roger Scruton has died and Britain has lost her greatest conservative thinker, writer, fox hunting man, philosopher and all-round-hero of the right. Like so many of the bravest and best, he was a prophet almost without honour in his own country.

Sir Roger Scruton has died. Diagnosed with cancer last summer, he passed away peacefully on Sunday surrounded by his family.

"knighthood for Professor Roger Scruton, often described as Britain’s foremost philosopher"

For some time, the leading Western nations have acted upon the assumption that democracy is the solution to political conflict, and that the ultimate goal of foreign policy must be to encourage the emergence of democracy in countries which have not yet enjoyed its benefits. And they continue to adhere to this assumption, even when considering events in the Middle East today. We can easily sympathise with it. For democracies do not, in general, go to war with each other, and do not, in general, experience civil war within their borders. Where the people can choose their government, there is...

The project of European integration, advanced by politicians and elites of defeated nations in the wake of the Second World War, was founded on the belief that nationhood and national self-determination were the prime causes of the wars that had ruined Europe. There were disputes as to who started it: Napoleon? Bismarck? The French Revolutionaries? The Revolutionaries of 1848? The Reactionaries and Monarchists? Metternich? Talleyrand? Garibaldi? Fichte? Wagner? Louis XIV? But, however far back you went, in the eyes of the post-war political survivors, you came across the demon of nationalism, locked in conflict with the pure spirit of Enlightenment....

I was brought up at a time when half the English people voted Conservative at national elections and almost all English intellectuals regarded the term "conservative" as a term of abuse. To be a conservative, I was told, was to be on the side of age against youth, the past against the future, authority against innovation, the "structures" against spontaneity and life. It was enough to understand this, to recognize that one had no choice, as a free-thinking intellectual, save to reject conservatism. The choice remaining was between reform and revolution. Do we improve society bit by bit, or do...

In Vino Veritas: I'll Drink to That Roger Scruton June 2009 Concerns over binge drinking — the habit of drinking large quantities of alcohol with the intention of getting drunk, usually in company but without the benefit of conversation of any kind — have brought into focus the great difference that exists between virtuous and vicious drinking. Our puritan legacy, which sees pleasure as the doorway to vice, makes it difficult for many people to understand this difference. If alcohol causes drunkenness, they think, then the sole moral question concerns whether you should drink it at all, and if so...

Noam Chomsky's popularity owes little or nothing to the eminent place that he occupies in the world of ideas. That place was won many years ago in the science of linguistics, and no expert in the subject would, I think, dispute Prof. Chomsky's title to it.He swept away at a stroke the attempts of Ferdinand de Saussure and his followers to identify meaning through the surface structure of signs, as well as the belief, once prevalent among animal ethologists, that language could be acquired by making piecemeal connections between symbols and things. He argued that language is an all-or-nothing affair,...

APOLOGISTS for terrorism (and they are not in short supply) argue that it is a weapon used by people who despair of achieving their goals in any other way. It is a cry from the depths by those deprived of a voice in the political process. The terrorist is not an aggressor but a victim, and we must disarm him not by violence but by addressing the grievance that motivates his deeds. This argument has been used to excuse Palestinian suicide bombers, IRA kneecappers, Red Brigade kidnappers, and even the mass murderers of September 11. Its main effect is to...

A philosophy of pleasure. Roger Scruton National Review, April 18, 1994 v46 n7 pS1(2) Brief Summary: Pleasure has become unfairly associated with evil and perversion due to unsound theories by people such as Freud and Nietzsche. As a result, feelings and creations have become dehumanized and unpleasurable. Pleasure, as both intellectual and physical stimulation, makes for happier humans. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- HUMAN PLEASURE may be sensual, like the pleasure of a hot bath, or intellectual, like the pleasure of mathematical proof. But the pleasures that matter most to us, and that shape our lives and personalities, are neither purely sensual nor purely...