The Making of Roger Scruton

Cambridge, October 1964. A new undergraduate named Mary Hoffman is sitting in the corner at a party, feeling sorry for herself. She doesn’t know anybody, the friends she arrived with have disappeared, and she is just about to go home when a third-year student comes over to introduce himself. He has flame-red hair and craggy features that put her in mind of the nouvelle vague heartthrob Jean-Paul Belmondo. And as they talk, it dawns on her that she’s never met anybody like this in her life. He knows all about her subject—English literature—even though he’s not studying it. At the age of twenty, he seems to have the world at his feet. That night, he walks her back across the River Cam to Newnham College, and by the time they get there she has concluded two things. First, that women are going to be fighting over this man; and second, that she doesn’t stand a chance.

Yet that year they become, in an on-and-off way, boyfriend and girlfriend. Sixty-two years later, she shares her reminiscences with me. Going to see the new Dirk Bogarde film. Long conversations about music and books: When Hoffman ventured that she quite enjoyed Bach, he advised her to try Mozart. (“He said it would be like liking Donne and then finding Shakespeare. And he was quite right, of course.”) Discovering their shared insecurity: She had been a scholarship girl and he was a grammar-school boy from a poor background, so both were estranged from Cambridge’s upper-class social world. She told him once that her father, a rail worker, was a disappointed man who would have liked to be a teacher. He replied that his own father was a teacher, and he was a disappointed man, too. And she remembers how glamorous it was to come back to her room after lectures and find that he had arrived—nobody locked their doors in those days—and was sitting there playing her guitar.

 Not that anybody believes her. “When I tell people I used to go out with Roger Scruton they say, ‘What?!’ And I say: ‘Ah, but you don’t know what he was like when he was twenty.’”

People who knew Scruton in his early years have sometimes asked themselves the question Hoffman now puts to herself: What on earth happened to him? Within a few decades, the kind, sweet-natured, and apolitical young man had become perhaps Britain’s most hated thinker, a granite-faced provocateur known for his fierce conservatism, his sympathy for Mrs. Thatcher, and his taste for foxhunting. Peter Findlay, good friends with Scruton at secondary school and then Cambridge, felt his public remarks were “hard to forgive,” and they drifted apart. Bron Grillo, Scruton’s first girlfriend, found herself nodding along when Private Eye denounced him. Hoffman, who became a successful author, once wrote to The Observer after a particularly mischievous Scruton piece about feminism. She wondered whether he saw the letter and remembered her.

The question of Scruton’s intellectual development has a broader interest, too. His mind was formed by the experience of the 1960s, the decade in which the modern world came of age. And Scruton is, without compare, the intellectual renegade of Europe’s ’60s generation—progenitor of a highly sophisticated conservative philosophy not only of politics, but of law, religion, culture, sex, music, architecture, the environment, the nation, and a dozen other subjects. No author has done more to shape the imagination of the European right, from Viktor Orbán and Giorgia Meloni to much of the leadership of both Reform U.K. and the Conservative Party. From where, one wonders, did this extraordinary and unique figure—“a rebel against rebellion,” as he called himself—emerge?

As I have sought to answer that puzzle, talking to Scruton’s old schoolfriends, girlfriends, and university friends, another question has occurred to me. When you speak to that generation, you are in touching distance of a world, not just before the internet, but before the impact of TV, when the Western cultural tradition was the most exciting diversion on offer. In 2004, the playwright Richard Foreman, born in 1937, hauntingly observed that he had grown up with an ideal of 

the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West.

And such multi-faceted evolved personalities did not hesitate . . . to cut down, like lumberjacks, large forests of previous achievement in order to stake new claim to the ancient inherited land—this was the ploy of the avant-garde.

But today, I see within us all (myself included) . . . [a] new self that needs to contain less and less of an inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance—as we all become “pancake people”—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.

If anyone in the twenty-first century exemplified the “cathedral-like” personality, a one-man version of Western civilization in its depth and breadth, it was Roger Scruton. And it is worth asking, in the age of us pancake people, how those cathedral-like personalities were once formed.

Scruton was always clever: One contemporary remembers “how impressed my mother was with Roger’s ability (even when at primary school) to explain how mechanical things like household equipment really worked.” In 1954, at the age of ten, Scruton started at the Royal Grammar School High Wycombe (RGS), a leading example of the postwar schools that provided a first-rate education to children from poor and middling backgrounds.

But he was also, from the beginning, a rebel. Like many of his generation, Scruton grew up amid a sense of greater prosperity and opportunity than his parents had ever known. That generation gap, which the sixties turned into a chasm, was in Scruton’s case exacerbated by his relationship with his father, Jack, a primary school teacher and class warrior who was the local rep for the National Union of Teachers. Depressive, embittered, and sometimes violent, Jack had furious rows with Scruton’s mother, the gentle, timid, universally loved Beryl (nicknamed “Darl”).

“His dad expected him to do things like spend a bit of time on the vegetable garden, do this and do that, and Roger wouldn’t have anything to do with it,” says one schoolfriend. Age fourteen, Roger subscribed to the Daily Worker, simply because the socialist Jack loathed Soviet communism as anti-patriotic and exploded with rage every time the newspaper dropped through the letter box. At other times Roger would mercilessly probe his father’s political philosophy (“So, Dad, justice doesn’t mean equality?”) until Jack stomped off to dig the allotment. Most threateningly of all, Roger visibly aspired to another life, a more cultured and elevated world than that of Jack’s working-class Mancunian roots. One day Jack came into the room to find his son playing the piano, and slammed the lid down on his fingers.

The father–son relationship was “just awful,” says Grillo, who dated the teenage Scruton. “I think it really, really bruised him as a child, because he didn’t get the recognition that he so obviously craved and was always looking for.” It also helped to make Scruton into a disputatious, defiant teenager. He had a “disregard for the established hierarchy,” Grillo recalls. “Anything that someone said, he was against it. We called him an enfant terrible.”

At school, he challenged RGS’s strict culture, an imitation public-school regime complete with housemasters, rugby, classics, army cadets, liberal use of the slipper as a punishment, and rigid discipline. Even outside school, for instance, any boy in his RGS blazer was also required to wear the school cap. The headmaster, the celebrated and feared E. R. Tucker, was determined that RGS would win more scholarships to Oxbridge than the high-flying Manchester Grammar School. The two schools’ numbers were solemnly read out in assembly each year. RGS boys were to be cabinet ministers and senior civil servants, Tucker had decided, and there would be no excuses in matters of discipline, academic achievement, or character. R. V. Scruton was a strong student, who excelled at the sciences in particular. But a model RGS boy he was not. Grillo recalls his comeback to one teacher who saw him walking down the hill from school and demanded: “Scruton! Why aren’t you wearing your cap?” Scruton: “Habit, I suppose, sir.” Grillo still chuckles at that six decades later. “Only Scruton could have come out with that. Just nailed it, really.”

His rebellions escalated to setting off explosions around the school, and to a final prank, of which at least three entirely different versions have passed into legend, but which in any case seems to have been the final straw for E. R. Tucker. Scruton stayed long enough to win a scholarship to Jesus College, Cambridge, but he left without completing his final year. Nevertheless, he was forever grateful for the formation he received at RGS. He learned more in his six years there, he once wrote, than in any other period of his life.

Much of that education was off the curriculum. In his autobiographical essay collection, Gentle Regrets, Scruton described a series of quasi-religious awakenings to music and literature: hearing his mother play Beethoven’s Sonata Pathétique on the piano at home; stumbling fortuitously on a copy of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet; falling head over heels for Mozart, T. S. Eliot, Stravinsky; tearing through the literary canon in the public library, and listening, rapt, to the LPs that arrived in the post from the Classics Club. The young Scruton had “a greed for knowledge,” recalls his old schoolmate Peter Findlay. “He was interested in absolutely everything.” Findlay himself liked classical music, but then his dad had been forcing it down his throat from a young age, so blues and jazz were far more exciting. For Scruton, whose childhood home contained few books and little music, high culture became a consuming fascination.

The Royal Grammar School, then, meant for him not boring lessons and pointless rules, but people who shared and broadened his enthusiasms. Foremost among them was Tom Chandler, who, in Scruton’s words, “would pour out his romantic heart to me as we sat upstairs in the damp Victorian slum where he lived with his parents.” Chandler was a classicist whose “heroes were Bartók and Yeats”; the boys later went traveling together and would write each other letters, sometimes in verse, “building on the foundations of our adolescent love a wonderful castle of allusions and illusions, in which we could shut out the world and treasure our aloofness.” Chandler tells me he once got a letter from Grillo, on holiday with Scruton, reporting: “It’s going alright, but all bloody Scruton ever wants to do is talk about you.”

Then there were the teachers who, out of hours, would introduce the boys to a wider culture—like Mr. Pelmore, the chemistry master who knew all about German Romanticism, and Mr. Chapman, who invited the boys round to hear his stories of imperial service in Africa and discuss Beethoven’s quartets and Durkheim’s sociology. One teacher, whom Scruton never met, nevertheless had a profound influence through his pupils: Derek Broadbridge, a disciple of the Cambridge literary critic F. R. Leavis and the founder of an intense discussion group for sixth-formers, The “13” Society. 

As the name suggests, The “13” was exclusive and pretentious and—in Peter Findlay’s words—“had a rather sect-like quality. These were people who thought of themselves, and were thought of probably, as the superior intellects of the school.” Findlay recalls: “You went and sat down and it was a bit quiet, and somebody said, ‘Who’s going to read a paper this evening?’” Subjects included atomic power, Four Quartets, Nietzsche, number theory, medieval theater, and Pythagoras. Scruton contributed a talk on Rilke’s Duino Elegies despite not really having a clue what it was about.

At school, Scruton was seen as “a bit of a nerd,” says Chandler, who had to persuade his friends to let Scruton join the comic revue they were putting on. Scruton did take an interest in the first stirrings of the sixties—“rock, R&B and sexual intercourse,” as he put it in Gentle Regrets—but his focus was elsewhere. “Roger was less easily distracted by the popular and the everyday that was around us,” says Findlay. Scruton himself recalled that, though he played bass guitar in a band, “even while doing it I regarded myself as just as ridiculous as the people around me.”

Even his girlfriend came second to his cultural fascinations. “Although Roger was lovely,” says Grillo, “he wasn’t very committed.” One evening her parents were away, and she was lonely and frightened in the house. Instead of coming around, Scruton spent the evening playing the piano with his schoolfriends. “Which is absolutely fair enough, looking back on it. But I was a bit cross with him.”

Scruton’s great musical companion was Dave Cox, an intense, introspective boy who could play the Bartók piano sonata, and who introduced Scruton to two books. One was Erich Heller’s The Disinherited Mind, a study of German intellectual history since Goethe. “They were quite steeped in it,” says Findlay. “It was alien, esoteric, and opened up areas of intellectual life in a rather demanding way to these young sixth-formers who wanted to be different.” Chandler remembers reading the book, too, and thinking “that there was this world that I probably could belong to if I worked at it.” The other book was Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, a thousand-page, labyrinthine theory of world history, which enthralled Scruton with its tale of the inexorable rise and fall of civilizations, and its prediction that

a few centuries from now there will no more be a Western Culture, no more be German, English or French than there were Romans in the time of Justinian . . . One day the last portrait of Rembrandt and the last bar of Mozart will have ceased to be—though possibly a coloured canvas and a sheet of notes may remain—because the last eye and the last ear accessible to their message will have gone.

Long after, Scruton came to see the book as self-indulgently mournful. Nevertheless, in the formation of his mind this was a crucial moment, confirming for him the majesty of Western culture and resonating with his adolescent sense of poignant loss. Bron Grillo remembers Scruton saying that he would never want to bring children into such a terrible world. He had, as he later put it, “a sense of the national culture as something irreplaceable and threatened, and this makes you defensive toward the modern age.”

If he overcame that defensiveness, it was thanks to T. S. Eliot, perhaps the decisive intellectual influence on Scruton’s teens. Eliot mourned civilizational loss, but he was also a modernist who proved that artistic genius might still flourish in postwar England. His spirituality resonated with readers—like the teenage Scruton—who had no religious faith but acknowledged Christianity as part of their cultural inheritance. And Eliot’s prose laid down principles Scruton would take as his own: the difference between real emotion and sentimentality, and the necessity of tradition for any truly original art.

Both those principles could also be found in the literary criticism of F. R. Leavis, then a major presence in British intellectual life, whose study of English poetry, Revaluation, gave Scruton, as he would recall, “a tremendous belief in English culture and literature. I never thought there was an alternative to what we had inherited. You either learn to inherit it properly or you become disinherited.” By the time he left school he had concluded that literary criticism was “of immense importance to the nation.”

This is turning into a portrait of the super-serious cultural conservative as a young man. It shouldn’t be overdone. Bron Grillo (then Bron Ryan) remembers Scruton as “delightful,” funny, a reassuring presence in her anxious teenage years. “He was quite a comfort really, very easygoing and tolerant.” She pictures him dancing with her mother at a party: “Animate yourself, Mrs. Ryan. Animate yourself!” He had “this way with language from an early age” and liked to invent his own terminology: “Shoes” became, in Chaucerian fashion, “shoon,” and flowers “floon.” (“I still say floon,” comments Hoffman.)

Bron’s family, the Ryans, were a complicated, fascinating bunch whom Scruton got to know when he was sixteen. Desmond, her father, had inherited wealth and lived as a man about town in Paris: He appears in Samuel Beckett’s letters as an occasional drinking partner. Scruton sketched him as “a witty Irishman who had read everything, slept with everyone, spent whatever he could, and was recovering in a village near Fontainebleau,” where Scruton in later years would sometimes visit him. Desmond was divorced from Bron’s mother, Isabel, who in 1960 was living in Marlow with the painter and novelist Bob Newman. This family, for Scruton, must have confirmed that another life was possible. They were arty, witty, cosmopolitan, with an air of almost aristocratic decadence. Scruton would listen, rapt, to Bob’s stories of Left Bank bohemia, of evenings at La Coupole where Picasso or Hemingway might swing by. Another member of the Ryan circle was the wild young art student John Law, a friend of Scruton’s who lived hand to mouth, and whom Scruton has described as caring for nobody and nothing except art. (“There’s a bit of projection there,” Grillo frowns when I read out this description. “I think Roger’s exaggerating.”)

Provincial England in the 1950s is generally thought of as a staid environment, and Scruton tended to portray it as somewhere where nothing ever happened. But there is something to be said for a society in which a gifted teenager, without money or connections, can become a connoisseur of Western culture, befriend artists like John Law and Bob Newman, breathe the imagined air of the Left Bank, and find himself two degrees of separation from Beckett and Picasso. The teenage Scruton was “overwhelmed,” he told Mark Dooley five decades later, with “desire for this enchanted world that lay just a few hundred miles away across the water.”

The Ryans may have become a surrogate family of sorts, but Scruton also took a great deal from his own father. It wasn’t merely that the young Roger—inasmuch as he thought about politics at all—was a leftist, persuaded by Bernard Shaw’s arguments for the superiority of socialism to capitalism. It was also that, as with Jack’s views, all Roger’s ideals were filtered through an unwavering English patriotism. Moreover, father and son shared a cause. They were equally horrified by the postwar craze for redevelopment: the concreting-over of the countryside, the sweeping-away of town centers, the rapid construction of ugly new housing. In High Wycombe and down the road in Marlow, where the Scrutons had moved around 1960 when their son was sixteen, Jack became a tenacious campaigner whose efforts have passed into local legend. He was the man who saved the Rye, Wycombe’s principal green space. “My father had many qualities,” says the narrator of Scruton’s semi-autobiographical novel Francesca:

He spoke to plants as though they were children. He looked at buildings as though he shared secrets with them. . . . He loved this place, he loved England, and even if he was destructive of everything personal, that doesn’t alter the main fact, which was that he held things together.

Some people, it must be said, found Jack a kindlier man than the overbearing figure portrayed by his son. What is not in doubt is that Roger was desperate to escape the family home. “I went out quite anxious into the world,” Scruton once told an interviewer, “but nevertheless thinking that there’s nothing good that can happen to me, except by me . . . making it happen out of my own energy.”

This helps to explain another of his intellectual fascinations. For a teenager who knew he was unusually gifted and energetic and yet was wracked with uncertainty, Nietzsche’s amoral individualism had a seductive appeal. Nietzsche viewed pity for the weak as a morbid hangover from Christianity; Scruton was tempted to agree, until one day he saw High Wycombe’s town bookseller, a disabled man, struggling to carry a load of books from his car. Scruton simply could not feel contempt for this faithful servant of literary culture. Nevertheless, the Nietzschean spirit—the reckless individualism, the willingness to shock and provoke—was part of Scruton’s makeup. Tom Chandler has a story of the twenty-two-year-old Scruton offering to give him “a lift” when Chandler needed to get to Norfolk. “What I didn’t realize was that he was going to drive me up there on a powerful motorbike, which he had no license for. Had never taken any driving test, no insurance, no nothing.” Chandler was “completely shocked. I had never seen this side of him.”

As a teenager, when arrested for riding the London Underground without a ticket, Scruton gave his name to the police as “John Stuart Mill.” At Cambridge, he risked suspension after women’s clothing was discovered in his room. His defense, swallowed by the Jesus College authorities, was that he was experimenting with transvestism. Chandler remembers Scruton in his early twenties stealing “hundreds of books” from Foyles in London by going in there with a suitcase. It’s worth dwelling on this daring, boundary-pushing aspect of Scruton’s character, because he has so often been portrayed as an otherworldly and ineffectual figure eloquently sighing over a lost past. He sometimes played up to the caricature; but there was another side to him, which in youth took a destructive form and in maturity became a source of his perpetual creativity. Risk-taking, he once remarked, brings out the best aspects of human nature. 

Indeed, Scruton was wary of nostalgia precisely because it freezes action, and his work is full of admonitions against sentimentality. His childhood had been too unhappy for Scruton to idealize any kind of past. Though he lamented “modernity” and sometimes sounded as though he regretted the Enlightenment, he was unimpressed by philosophers like Alasdair MacIntyre who pressed too hard the case for the premodern. Scruton’s How to Be a Conservative concludes with a chapter “forbidding mourning”; in England: An Elegy he startlingly dismisses a swath of nostalgic artworks and institutions, from Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia to the Prayer Book Society. “The regret leads nowhere.”

Scruton dissented from his father’s version of socialism partly because of its “helplessness,” he wrote, its fixation on what had been permanently stolen by the ruling classes. Likewise, he eventually repudiated The Decline of the West, because:

Rather than overcoming loss by discovering a path for himself, rather than ceasing his lamentations for the sake of what might be saved, Spengler chose to contemplate the image of catastrophe and find his consolation there. He remained on the threshold of a world from which he withdrew in tragic self-contemplation, risking nothing, fathering nothing, and tenderly brooding on the fact of death.

For Scruton, the question is always what is to be done. His clandestine adventures behind the Iron Curtain are only the best-known example of his constant urge to make things happen, to create, to resist, to put himself on the line.

The central theme of Scruton’s work is the search for home, and one of its most revealing expressions appears, almost as an aside, in a 2002 review of a Milan Kundera novel:

What place is there, in the modern world, for the old experience of homecoming—the nostos evoked by Homer in the story of Odysseus? . . . Nostalgia, [Kundera] reminds us, is intrinsic to the human condition and afflicts us in many ways. But it is never more painful than when the home that is yearned for has vanished for ever and when that home was in any case rejected.

When Scruton wrote this, he had already settled in the Wiltshire countryside with his family and his horses and had begun to construct his best answer to the question he poses in this passage. For most of his adult life, though, he was something of an Odyssean wanderer himself.

His journeyings began at the age of seventeen, when after taking the Cambridge scholarship exam, he walked out on his school and his parents and fled to London. Then, after a few months working at a café and sleeping on the floor of his sister’s boyfriend’s flat in an East End slum, Scruton went abroad. With Tom Chandler, he hitchhiked to Greece by way of Brussels, Salzburg, and the Balkans. By the time they got to Patras, Chandler had run out of money and had to return home. But Scruton was desperate to see Alexandria, so he pressed on to the Greek islands—a time he would describe, three decades later, as the happiest of his life—and then worked his passage to Egypt, before ending up “penniless and homesick in Lebanon.” He could get back to England only by working as a deck hand on a Norwegian ship carrying potatoes. But still he did not want to return to the miserable family home in High Wycombe. So he and Chandler rented a room in Birmingham, where they spent their days in the city library.

These adventures, which took place in 1961–2, have something of the sixties spirit about them. But when did The Sixties, with a capital T and a capital S, begin? The British historian David Kynaston has identified October 5, 1962 as the turning-point: The Beatles released their first single, James Bond made his first appearance on screen, the satirists and commentators were beginning to take apart the creaking establishment. Moreover, that month a new generation came of age. The 1962 university intake had lived their whole lives in the era of the 1944 Butler Act, which opened up free secondary education to the children of the less well-off. These students were ambitious, driven, unburdened by the stricter morality and the political loyalties of their parents’ world. Among them was Roger Scruton.

Yet Cambridge University was not exactly a ringside seat on the Swinging Decade. The atmosphere was stifling. Students were at the mercy of strict curfews and patrolling proctors: You had to ask permission to leave town for more than a day, and there were bars on the windows to stop you from climbing out. Intellectually, too, the place sometimes disappointed. Terry Eagleton, who began a research fellowship at Jesus College in Scruton’s time there, wrote of sitting with “doddering, quasi-fascistic clergymen at High Table who talked of Gladstone’s Irish Home Rule Bill as though it could still be headed off with a spot of ingenuity.” In fact, Jesus included some exceptionally distinguished scholars—above all, the polymath Laurence Picken, a mentor reverently portrayed in Scruton’s I Drink Therefore I Am. With figures of Picken’s brilliance around, and with Wittgenstein a living memory, Cambridge did much to fire Scruton’s intellectual ambitions. Nevertheless, he found the dons out of touch with modern intellectual life and the tutorials nearly useless. Compared to the rigor of RGS, Peter Findlay says, Cambridge was a place of low expectations. 

For a grammar-school boy, meanwhile, Jesus College presented a hostile environment. “Everyone,” Eagleton recalled, “seemed to be about six-foot tall and to address one another like public meetings. . . . All the appurtenances of a certain confident and dominative upper-class style were very much in evidence.” Jesus was, in Eagleton’s words, home to “rugger buggers, academic time-servers and upper-class louts.” Scruton remembered the place as the fiefdom of old Etonians and Harrovians; he later wrote, tongue partly in cheek, of drawing inspiration from the playwright Harold Pinter’s terse dialogue:

If, in response to the haughty voice which says “Could you pass the potatoes,” you reply “Yes, of course,” then you remain as obscure and dispensable as any other member of your class. But if you reply, “What do you mean, potatoes?” or “I don’t eat potatoes,” or “By hand?” then at once the conversation enters another dimension of meaning. The game of power is in the open.

One fellow philosophy student detected in Scruton a “grammar-school chippiness,” while Nico Mann, an old Etonian who was at King’s, says his first impression was of “someone who was at least putting forward that he was a left-wing, working-class guy who was not going to have too much nonsense from blokes like me.” They soon became friends. Still, Scruton considered himself an outsider in Cambridge, sticking close to the RGS pals who had also gone to Jesus—Peter Findlay who went up to read modern languages, Norman Freeman who was studying zoology, and Dave Cox who, reluctantly but in obedience to his parents’ wishes, opted for law. Another grammar-school boy at Jesus, Bernard Brown, became a lifelong friend. “We considered the establishment as rather stuffy,” Brown has said.

Scruton’s grammar-school friends rebelled against Cambridge in various ways. In the Jesus College matriculation photo, everyone is wearing the required white shirt—apart from Scruton and Findlay, who are in black. One of the grammar-school boys took a hacksaw to the bars on his window, a symbolic act of resistance.

Scruton likewise began with an act of academic defiance, dropping natural sciences in search of something more meaningful. Previously, science had seemed the passport to success; but now it bored him compared with the humanities. Bernard Brown recalls that they “often talked about the great divide between science and other forms of culture—literature and so on.” On the advice of Dr. Picken, his tutor—the college fellow with pastoral responsibility for him—Scruton switched to philosophy.

In Cambridge at that time, philosophy was a highly technical and linguistic discipline. The teaching was mostly poor and the subject arid: Peter Findlay once looked over Scruton’s shoulder and saw him doing what looked like a page of mathematical formulae. It was logical notation, Scruton explained with a sigh. For the boy intoxicated with Nietzsche and Spengler, Cambridge philosophy could seem lifeless and pedantic.

He was rescued, during that first year, by discovering Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. In resonant and poetic words, it conveyed “arguments which radically altered my vision of reality, in particular the subtle discussion of the self and its grammar.” To oversimplify grossly, Wittgenstein’s work challenged the notion of a “private object” disclosed only to one’s own mind. For Wittgenstein, as Scruton later put it, the key thing is “the public realm.” Scruton came to see that argument as one of the defining achievements of modern philosophy. It is no coincidence that Scruton’s politics, his aesthetics, and his life were so preoccupied with the public realm and how it forms the inner world of the individual.

The other key influence from his studies, and probably the major inspiration for Scruton as a philosopher, was Immanuel Kant. Inspired by Jonathan Bennett’s lectures, Scruton set up a group with his fellow students to explore Kant’s works. From then on he was, for good or ill, immersed in the Kantian world-picture, in which—as he would later describe it to Mark Dooley—human understanding is bounded and yet aware of something more. “Like flies at a window, we gather at the edge. But the light in that window comes from nowhere that we could visit, not even in thought.” Scruton’s work returns again and again to this kind of image.

More generally, Cambridge philosophy gave Scruton a sense of the distinction between real thinking and fake thinking, a BS detector that alerted him to dud arguments. As a teenager, he had learned from F. R. Leavis the distinction between sentimentality and true feeling; now, as a student, he gained a sense of when a conclusion had been too easily won. He came to relish philosophy as a “hard and scientific discipline,” and some of his adolescent dreaminess began to fade. Spengler now came across as windy and histrionic.

What the teaching lacked, the undergraduate community more than made up for. Scruton and another undergraduate, Malcolm Budd, gave each other demanding tutorials. There were several groups in which a dozen or so students met up every fortnight to hear a paper or discuss a topic. (Shades of The “13”.) “An enormous amount of work got done,” says a fellow student. 

To an almost unimaginable extent, it was an intellectual life untouched by politics. If you pressed Scruton, you would find him generally left-leaning and Labour-sympathizing, but neither the students nor the dons were especially bothered about such matters. Scruton had no idea what his lecturers’ politics were, and he was dismayed when, during the 1964 election, Jonathan Bennett had the vulgarity to wear a Labour sticker on his lapel.

In hindsight, the storm of the sixties was already sweeping east from London. But even by 1965 it was only on the horizon. “If Roger had come up a couple of years later than he did,” Mary Hoffman remarks, “he might have had a quite different Cambridge experience.” Within her time, the Beatles and the Stones became the soundtrack to student life, cannabis began to weave its spell, and Cambridge’s rigidity and stuffiness drew back. Clive James’s Cambridge memoir, May Week Was in June, carries a palpable feeling of a new generation realizing the world is theirs for the taking. But by the time James and Hoffman arrived in Cambridge, Scruton was about to leave.

“It’s difficult to recapture now,” Hoffman tells me, “but it did seem like a very young and free and fresh time to be there. And I feel a bit sad that Roger missed out on that. I think he would have quite liked it. It might have freed him up a bit. He was a little bit uptight.” Peter Findlay thought Scruton belonged more to the ’50s than to the ’60s: There was an innate austerity and small-c conservatism about him. “At the time we were good pals,” Findlay says. But in retrospect, “I just think he saw us as wasting our time with all this pop stuff, and not taking Cambridge seriously enough.”

Scruton and his friends loved to sit and listen to music together, taking in everything from Byrd and Schubert to contemporary composers like Stockhausen and Boulez. Free time, in those days, tended to mean putting a record on. Grillo, when she visited Scruton in Cambridge, remembers how “he played Don Giovanni all the way through, and it was just lovely. He had such a sensitivity. He needed music, really, to calm himself.”

He ranged a little beyond the classical canon: Muddy Waters, Ray Charles. But that was about as far as it went. Meanwhile Dave, his old musical companion, was growing obsessed with the Beatles. Dave’s fascination with composition, with the inner logic of a piece, was now focused on Lennon and McCartney. (Dave’s dependence on alcohol was also increasingly evident. He went off the rails after Cambridge and died in his late forties.)

Scruton didn’t mind dancing to the Beatles at parties, but his intellect was devoted to other matters. In later years, he described how he and his Cambridge contemporaries entered the “cathedral” of high culture, a precious shared experience. Already, though, in that era of transition when pop culture was about to sweep all before it, he was more utterly committed to the “cathedral”—to Eliot and Stravinsky and Western philosophy—than were his friends.

In other ways, too, he was moving imperceptibly away from the RGS group. Scruton lived in a different part of the college, in nicer rooms granted to him as a scholarship winner. And having switched subjects, he was working furiously to keep up, discovering a single-minded studiousness the others couldn’t match. During vacation, when Scruton came to stay with Grillo in her student flat in Trinity College Dublin, she noticed it, too. “He would always set aside some time to go off and read his philosophy books, which used to annoy me. That’s not what we did in Ireland.”

Along with this drive, as ever, was the Scruton anxiety. “I think that inner boy was there somewhere,” says Grillo, “always very restless, always seeking approval and acceptance.” Hoffman gives a striking example of his insecurity. “If he wanted flowers in his room he would go out and buy a bigger bunch, bring it back to the college and put half in a vase in his room, and then set out again with the remaining half-bunch, lest anyone who saw him thought he was buying flowers for himself. He would pretend he was buying them for a woman.”

Like so many people in this time of upheaval, Scruton was looking for an identity. In his first published article, a short piece for the undergraduate magazine Circuit, he launched an attack on Christian morality, claiming it was incoherent. Scruton was still something of an enfant terrible—and a Nietzschean. But by 1965, when he graduated with a double first in philosophy, he still did not really know what he believed, or where he wanted to end up, or how he would earn a living. Nevertheless, certain things were crystallizing. “I sometimes asked myself, ‘where am I going?’ And always the answer would be that I must be a writer—that is the thing I must be.”

So he moved to France, the spiritual home of the bohemian intellectual, spending a year teaching in Pau, where the University of Bordeaux had a college. Renting an old farmhouse in the foothills of the Pyrenees, he found himself once again rather lost. The college was barren of intellectual debate. His students, just a little younger than he, seemed uninterested in the classical music he urged on them. Sometimes the farmhouse was cut off by the mists, leaving its occupant trapped “with neither piano, radio nor gramophone, none of which I could afford.” He consoled himself by “playing the symphonies of Beethoven in my head” and by befriending the students. Why, he began to ask himself, did he feel so strongly that they should be listening to great music? To him it was supremely meaningful art, but what was that meaning exactly? He would spend the next half-century refining his answers to those questions.

In 1966, Scruton won a Harper-Wood award, a Cambridge literature prize to help up-and-coming writers travel and study. He used the money to go to Rome, hoping to write a novel. On that trip Scruton discovered that he was more a bourgeois than a bohemian. He told the story vividly to his literary executor, Mark Dooley, in Conversations with Roger Scruton: how, still trying to write a novel that never saw the light of day, he rented a room from a young woman called Elena Einaudi; how he got to know her American hippie friends, who were full of resentment against their own parents and the U.S. government, and who “would smoke cannabis and make slow, sage remarks about how it’s all kind of creepy out there, know what I mean?” To Scruton they were spoiled, boring brats whose alternative culture was a road to nowhere. Then, after Scruton had left Rome, it all turned to tragedy. One of the Americans got Elena pregnant and disappeared. She isolated herself with the baby, from whom she caught rubella. Elena was found dead, the baby still alive, and Scruton, who had tried to warn her against the father, felt partly culpable. But he also blamed the self-indulgence of the counterculture that had bewitched his friend.

Scruton took other, less traumatic, memories from Rome. He had visited Bernard Brown and his girlfriend Maria-Teresa, a couple who would remain his close friends all his life. Scruton and Maria-Teresa toured the churches of the city, seeing Bernini’s sculptures, Cavallini’s frescoes, and Borromini’s churches—one of which, San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, the older Scruton would name as his favorite building. Maria-Teresa was astonished at Scruton’s aesthetic perceptiveness, his understanding of light and structure. “Do you realize,” she asked Bernard, “your friend Roger is a genius?” Scruton, for his part, was astonished by the beauty all around him and its contrast with the hippies’ empty politics. He was starting to draw conclusions about where his allegiance lay.

One fellow Cambridge philosophy student believes it was around now that Scruton decided he was on the right. The undergraduate Scruton had been an “unremarkable left-liberal” in his politics, like 95 percent of his contemporaries. But coming back from Italy, the student says, “Roger knew he wanted to be a right-wing intellectual.” So around 1966 the student introduced him to the most pronounced conservative in his circle, the literary critic John Casey.

Casey, then a few years older than Scruton and already a fellow of Caius College, is one of the first known individuals to be described as a “young fogey”—the type characterized by tweed suits, fastidious tastes, nostalgic patriotism, linguistic pedantry, and a suspicion of the modern, especially in architecture and liturgy. Casey added to the type a lightning-quick intellect trained on Leavis and Wittgenstein. He and Scruton immediately took to each other when their mutual friend had them over for dinner. “You know when you invite two people to meet, and you end up as the gooseberry?”

The friend recalls that Scruton “squeezed Casey for all he was worth.” The process, at this distance, is impossible to reconstruct. Casey has said that Scruton struck him as “entirely apolitical”: What preoccupied the younger man was philosophy, music, and “the spoliation of England by modernist architects.” Casey himself dated Scruton’s politicization to the early ’70s. Yet it was probably impossible, in the late ’60s, to be best friends with John Casey and not take on some conservative leanings.

For their mutual friend, who is one of the less sympathetic witnesses to Scruton’s early years, this new political identity had a lot to do with personal ambition. “I think Scruton wanted to mark himself out,” he says. “He was very good at cultivating people.” Peter Findlay is more agnostic on this question: It is hard, he remarks, to disentangle personal ambition from the mere drive to achieve something worthwhile. Grillo recalls the younger Scruton as wanting to get on, but not exactly as a social climber: “He wasn’t interested in the class system as such. He was certainly interested in making connections, because that was the direction he wanted to go in: He wanted to go where there was beauty, and music, and wine . . .”

What can’t be underestimated, in the years before 1968, is Scruton’s uncertainty, his sense of instability. In 1967 his mother died of breast cancer, Scruton having returned to nurse her in her last illness—a desperate time of sorrow and guilt described in a few unbearable pages in Gentle Regrets. With his mother’s death vanished Scruton’s last chance of reconciliation with his home. He was now, finally and entirely, making his own way. But toward what? He wanted to be an artist, but he didn’t seem to have the talent, or why was an unsatisfactory novel still sitting in draft form in his notebooks? He could be an academic philosopher, and later in 1967 he came back to Cambridge to do a PhD; but he knew that alone wouldn’t satisfy him. He was still good friends with the RGS group, but very gradually the group was coming apart. He was in a serious relationship with Danielle Lafitte, whom he had met during the year at Pau and would eventually marry, but from early on the relationship seems to have been troubled and anxious. Six years had passed since he had run away from home and ended up in Beirut. He was still bouncing from place to place, the future still a question mark.

Amid all this there was one radiant certainty: that he believed in civilization, and that civilization was still alive—precariously in England, perhaps, but magnificently in France, in its architecture, its wine, its national culture, in the villages and churches he had loved to visit on his Lambretta scooter ever since he first arrived in the Pyrenees. Even the president, Charles de Gaulle, had once granted a state funeral to the poet Valéry, and de Gaulle’s own memoirs, Scruton discovered, were both exquisitely written and illuminated by what the president called a certain idea of France.

In May 1968, then, as he visited Danielle in Paris, with his friends spending their days on the barricades, what Scruton saw shocked him. The atmosphere of that month was genuinely revolutionary. Ordinary life practically stopped, replaced by strikes, occupations, demonstrations, meetings, and spontaneous theater events. The entire city seemed to be involved in a mass political conference. The Paris police chief, Maurice Grimaud, called th events of May 1968 “the strangest . . . that Paris, and indeed France, had ever lived through.” As Arthur Marwick wrote in his history of the ’60s, the activists really believed that transformation was around the corner—that “the society we inhabit is the bad bourgeois society, but that, fortunately, this society is in a state of crisis, so that the good society which lies just around the corner can be easily attained if only we work systematically to destroy the language, the values, the culture, the ideology of bourgeois society.”

When the bricks started hitting the windows and the cars went up in flames, Scruton felt, at one level, a “literary critical” distaste: The whole performance was shallow and vulgar. More viscerally, he experienced an anger, a desire to fight back on behalf of what was most precious to him. He had little political knowledge. What he had—from his battles with his father and his headmaster, from his experiences as a grammar-school boy at Cambridge—was a long training in rebellion and its ironies. You can rebel against the left by being more radical than they are; you can rebel against people and institutions that you also respect; you can rebel to provoke; you can rebel on behalf of tradition and the establishment; you can rebel simply by baffling and disconcerting the people who think they’re better than you. (“What do you mean, potatoes?”) Many people in the 1960s were caught up in the revolutionary fervor of the hour, or swept along on a current of their own emotions. Scruton’s rebellion was always likelier to be conscious, deliberate, and original.

And so we come to the celebrated moment, described many times and most vividly in Gentle Regrets, when looking down from the little flat on the Rue de Bérite, Scruton recoiled with all his mind and heart from the revolutionary spirit of 1968. Probing his friends’ politics in the following days, he became convinced that whatever he believed, it was the opposite of that. “I came back to Cambridge,” he once said, “determined to reanimate a political outlook for the modern world.”

Soon after, he was offered research fellowships at three different colleges. He chose Peterhouse for its right-wing reputation, and “within weeks” at the college decided for certain that he could be a conservative, too. Stuart Gagg found his old pal changed: “There was suddenly this figure in a suit, standing by the mantelpiece and offering me a glass of sherry.” It wasn’t that Scruton was aloof or affected, exactly, but his character had crystallized.

I end up just sort of shaking my head,” Tom Chandler tells me. A lifelong socialist, Chandler was disappointed and sometimes appalled by the older Scruton’s public statements. To an extent, he was proud of his friend’s achievements and “admired him like mad” for his clandestine activities behind the Iron Curtain. And however many furious letters Chandler wrote to Scruton, the response would always be one of friendship: “You know, ‘You must come over to the farm and open a couple of bottles.’ And yet I was feeling this tremendous animosity.” But in the end, he wondered whether Scruton’s conservatism reflected a kind of exclusivity, and whether the exclusivity went back to the love of high culture. For Chandler, that total absorption in literature and music was something of a teenage phase. For Scruton it never ended.

By the 1980s, Peter Findlay was working as a quality assessor in higher education—a world where people would “cross themselves” at any mention of Scruton’s name. “While I had enormous respect for what Roger could do in terms of his writing and his thinking,” he tells me, “I never forgave him for some of the more outrageous things he said. And I regret that now.” With time, Findlay’s admiration for his grammar-school contemporary has deepened. The RGS boys all rebelled in one way or another. But “in a way, his rebellion was much more emphatic and original than ours was.”

Bron Grillo, likewise, agreed with Private Eye’s harsh criticisms of Scruton in the ’80s, but later softened. “The thing about Roger is he really believed. He had this great belief in beauty. When he came to visit us in Lewes, when I was married, he said: ‘Ah, this high street is so magnificent.’ Which it is, of course. It’s one of the fifty protected high streets in the country. But I’d never really taken that in, although I lived there, until he pointed it out. And now I can’t go down the high street without being aware of how fantastic it is.”

For Mary Hoffman, the course of Scruton’s life remains something of a mystery. She still thinks of the “dazzling” young man with what seemed like limitless potential, who had the kindness to rescue her at that party in October 1964. “He ought to have gone out and conquered the world,” she says. “Perhaps he did.”

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Image by Fronteiras do Pensamento via Creative Commons. Image cropped.