Roger Scruton

Sir Roger Scruton was a Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a philosopher, writer, and public commentator widely known for his work on aesthetics and culture and for his defense of conservative political philosophy.

Mr. Scruton was the author of more than forty books, ranging in subject matter from academic works on aesthetics, art, and music to popular accounts of conservatism, utopianism, and political philosophy to personal reflections on drinking wine and hunting.

A prolific essayist, Mr. Scruton regularly wrote columns and essays for such publications as The New Statesman, The American Spectator, The New Criterion, and The New Atlantis, where he was a contributing editor. He was also the editor of The Salisbury Review from its founding in 1982 until 2001.

In addition to his nonfiction, he wrote two novels and several short stories, and has composed two operas (The Minister and Violet).

Mr. Scruton taught philosophy and aesthetics at Princeton, Oxford, the University of St. Andrews, Boston University, and Birkbeck College. He was also a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a research fellow at the Institute for the Psychological Sciences. In 2011, Mr. Scruton delivered the Stanton Lectures at the Divinity School at the University of Cambridge. In 2010, he delivered the Gifford Lectures at St. Andrews. In 2009, he wrote and narrated an acclaimed hour-long BBC documentary, Why Beauty Matters.

Mr. Scruton was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (since 2003) and a fellow of the British Academy (since 2008). In 1998, he was awarded the Medal of Merit of the Czech Republic, one of that nation’s highest state honors, in recognition for his role in the “underground university” he had helped establish in Czechoslovakia in the last decade of communism. He received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Cambridge.

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