Today’s face of the day is Roger Scruton a Conservative philosopher and author of more than fifty books who died aged 75 on Sunday.
The author of more than 50 books on aesthetics, morality and politics, he was also a government advisor. Supporters hailed him as “the greatest conservative of our age”.
[…] Sir Roger was at the centre of controversy last year when he was dismissed from, then reinstated to, an unpaid role as a government housing advisor after criticism of his comments about China and Muslim immigrants.
After he was restored to the role when supporters said his remarks had been misrepresented, he said there was a “witch-hunt” against right-wing figures, aiming to characterise them as racist or fascist.
[…] Historian Timothy Garton Ash said he was “a man of extraordinary intellect, learning and humour, a great supporter of central European dissidents, and the kind of provocative – sometimes outrageous – conservative thinker that a truly liberal society should be glad to have challenging it”.
[…] He told the Guardian that he became a Conservative when visiting Paris during the 1968 student protests, which he saw as an “unruly mob of self-indulgent middle-class hooligans” professing “ludicrous Marxist gobbledegook”.
“I knew I wanted to conserve things rather than pull them down,” he said.
In 1971, he began teaching philosophy at Birkbeck College, but claimed his career was held back in the “heart of the left establishment”.
Three years later he became a founding member of the Conservative Philosophy Group, which was intended to provide an intellectual basis for the Conservative Party to regain power.
Newly elected Tory leader Margaret Thatcher attended the group.
In 1982, Sir Roger became founding editor of the Salisbury Review, a journal championing conservatism.
He also began visiting dissidents in Communist Czechoslovakia, smuggling in books, offering courses in suppressed subjects and supporting banned artists. In 1985 he was detained in Brno before being expelled from the country.
After the fall of Communism, Vaclav Havel, the dissident-turned-president, awarded Sir Roger the Medal of Merit.
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