His was spun out of his life – often agonisingly.īorn in Buslingthorpe, north-east of Lincoln, Roger was the son of Jack Scruton, a teacher, and his wife Beryl (nee Haynes), and was brought up in a somewhat uncultured home. He exemplified Nietzsche’s aphorism that “every philosophy is a sort of memoir”. Scruton was made a fellow of the British Academy in 2008 and knighted in 2016. In 1995, he and the campaigner for constitutional reform Anthony Barnett, who described the two of them as “at opposite ends of the political spectrum”, set up the Town and Country Forum, to tackle rural issues. He was an ardent Green and countryside supporter – as well as a keen huntsman – declaring that, while environmentalism has all the hallmarks of a leftwing cause, it is in fact about conservation, equilibrium and “oikophilia” (love of home), therefore “quintessentially conservative”. He and his second wife, Sophie Jeffreys, and their children, Sam and Lucy, eventually settled down in what he sometimes dubbed Scrutopia, near Malmesbury, in Wiltshire. Scruton held academic posts at Boston University (1992-95) and the Institute of Psychological Sciences, Arlington, Virginia (2007-09) and he was visiting professor at Oxford University from 2010, and a professorial fellow in moral philosophy at St Andrews University (2011-14). As a result, he was arrested and thrown out of Czechoslovakia several times in the 1980s – and, after the collapse of communism, was awarded medals by the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary. Under the codename Wiewórka, Polish for squirrel (“a tribute to my red hair”), he gave clandestine lectures, assisted dissident activism, and smuggled banned works (disguised as unused computer discs) into the Soviet bloc. In 1978, Scruton co-founded the Jan Hus Educational Foundation in Prague.
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