Roger Scruton and the Love of Home

Sir Roger Scruton (1944–2020) was a most uncharacteristic intellectual: a philosopher who spent much of his long career at war with the academy; a prolific author who eschewed the city for life on a farm, who hunted to hounds and wrote movingly on wine as that which comes to us wrapped in a “halo of significance”; a conservative who rejected liberal internationalism, but whose outlook was genuinely cosmopolitan; a courageous activist expelled from Communist Czechoslovakia for daring to speak of hope at a time when none existed; a thinker schooled in the Anglophone tradition of philosophy, yet one who was quintessentially European; someone who “served a full apprenticeship in atheism,” but who, having pondered his loss of faith against the backdrop of advancing secularism, “steadily regained it.” Scruton was a public intellectual who took risks for freedom and who never sought popularity when truth was at stake. Indeed, he spent a lifetime, as he put it, seeking “comfort in uncomfortable truths.”