Scruton seems to have been excellent at everything he tried, gaining a massive following throughout the English-speaking world and post-1989 Eastern Europe. In addition to writing roughly 50 books of cultural criticism and serious philosophy, European communists expelled him from the Eastern Bloc in the mid-1980s after proclaiming him an “undesirable person,” the Pet Shop Boys once sued him for libel in the 1990s, and, in 2005, the Guildhall School of Music and Drama performed his full opera, “Violet.” Scruton passed away on January 12, after a six-month battle with cancer. No one in his right mind could accuse English philosopher Roger Scruton of having lived a timid or a quiet life. With Burke, he fought a “forlorn but dignified resistance to the tides of history.” He sought a future in which the national loyalty would endure, holding things together, providing all of us with sources of hope.
In almost every way, Sir Roger Scruton was a thorn in the side of modernity and post-modernity.
