roger scruton Archives

Monday

March 23, 2026

Trump has given America back its heroes

This weekend, two statues were installed on the White House grounds. On the north side of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building stands a statue of Christopher Columbus. On the south side is “Freedom’s Charge,” a life-size portrayal by Chas Fagan of two soldiers in the Continental Army, one with a rifle, the other with a billowing Bunker Hill flag. In ordinary times, the temporary placement of such tokens of America history at the White House might pass without comment. These are not ordinary times. On the contrary, America is just now emerging from a destructive frenzy of woke self-loathing and iconoclasm. Just a few years ago, no emblem of American achievement was safe from crusading vandals.

Friday

January 17, 2020

Spectator Editorial

Tyranny of the minority

De mortuis nil nisi bonum, the Romans used to say: ‘Of the dead speak only good.’ We can speak nothing else of the friend and longtime Spectator contributor we lost in January. Sir Roger Scruton was a fearless and humane advocate for art, beauty, faith, peoplehood and tradition; a fierce defender of the right to free and honest speech; and a clear-eyed advocate for the legal inheritances and cultural unity of the English-speaking peoples. He was one of the first people to undergo ordeal by ‘cancel culture’, or persecution by progressives, which is why we dedicate this free-speech issue to him. In the early 1980s, Roger was effectively expelled from the academy for expressing conservative opinions in public.

Sunday

January 12, 2020

Dominic Green

Roger Scruton’s death impoverishes us all

As Douglas Murray says, Sir Roger Scruton was as scintillating in conversation as he was on the page. It was typical of Roger’s generosity that in September 2018, a month in which he had no less than three books coming out, he gave up an afternoon to recording a Spectator USA podcast at his home, Sunday Hill Farm in Wiltshire. We originally published it under the headline ‘Knight of the Living Philosophers’. His death at 75 impoverishes us all. Scruton was more than a philosopher. He wrote widely and well on subjects as various as wine and Wagner, fox-hunting and free trade. That month, Scruton the philosopher had published Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition.

Wednesday

April 10, 2019

Dominic Green

Roger Scruton on Soros and Hungary

‘It’s complete nonsense,’ Sir Roger Scruton told me last November. ‘It’s all fine. It’s only social media, isn’t it?’We were talking after the British government had appointed Scruton, Britain’s most eminent public intellectual, as the unpaid chairman of the Building Better, Building Beautiful commission. The appointment had unleashed a wave of outrage from the hard left — which, this being the age of Jeremy Corbyn, is also Her Majesty’s Opposition. Scruton was assailed as a homophobe, an apologist for date rape and eugenics, and, in a touching display of interfaith harmony, as both anti-Semitic and an Islamophobic. All of the accusations selectively misrepresented his statements, sometimes to the point of fiction.