A singular voice for freedom passes

Eccentric, insightful, controversial, and never dull, Roger Scruton, who passed away last month, shook up the philosophical and political world for most of his 92 years.  He was a conservative, of a uniquely British sort, and his writings stood athwart tyrannical ideologies of every kind, and for freedom and beauty. Anne Applebaum in the U.K.'s Spectator offers a fitting tribute.

I met Roger in the 1980s, when I was a graduate student at Oxford, after I volunteered to serve as a courier taking cash to dissidents in Poland. He and others--Tim Garton Ash, Jessica Dougals-Home--had organised whole networks of contacts there, starting with his philosopher friends and then building outwards. Twent years later, when I was writing a history of the region, I wrote to him to get his views on the deeper issues of collaboration and dissent in the Soviet world. He wrote back with what I still think is the best description of the way ideology works: "Facts no longer made contact with the theory, which had risen above the facts on clouds of nonsense, rather like in a theological system. the point was not to believe the theory but to repeat it ritualistically and in such a way that belief and truth become irrelevant."

Roger was a thinker who sought to change the world as well as to explain it. I don't think anyone else could have done both with such conviction.

More on Scruton's work and thought here.

Editor's note: Among his many other interests, Scruton advanced an aesthetic philosophy of urban design that local city planners would do well to read.

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