Roger Scruton: 'Funnily enough, my father looked very like Jeremy Corbyn'

• Published in: The Observer (London)
• Main Author: Adams, Tim
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: London (UK) Guardian News & Media Limited 06.10.2015
• Subjects: Corbyn, Jeremy; Deleuze, Gilles; Hobsbawm, Eric; Scruton, Roger; Zizek, Slavoj
• ISSN: 0029-7712

It would be fair to say the book did not receive a warm welcome. In 1985 Margaret Thatcher was at the height of her ideological warfare against the nation's research departments, particularly in the humanities; the dons of Oxford University had just taken the unprecedented step of refusing the prime minister an honorary degree. Scruton, the most visible example of that suddenly rare breed, a rightwing academic, found himself a lightning rod for all the fear and loathing six years of Tory government had produced; his somewhat esoteric book was greeted with derision and outrage with, as he recalls, "reviewers falling over each other for a chance to spit on the corpse". The vitriol was such, he suggests, that it marked "the beginning of the end of my academic career" and made him a pariah (I recall seeing Scruton stand up to make a contribution to an open lecture at Cambridge not long after that, and a loud hiss going around the audience before the bogeyman had a chance to speak). His publisher, Longman, apparently under pressure of a boycott from other more profitable writers on its academic list, swiftly remaindered the book, and Scruton was left with several boxes of them in his garden shed. Now 71, and generally up for a scrap, Scruton approaches publication with a degree of trepidation -- he originally returned the advance his current publisher, Bloomsbury, had given him for the book under instruction from his wife, Sophie, who told him: "[Roger Scruton], you don't want to go there again!" But in the end, he says, he was persuaded by the fact that despite everything, despite the collapse of communism, what he calls the radical leftwing "nonsense factory" with its impenetrable texts established by the likes of Louis Althusser and Gilles Deleuze, had not gone away. "That, I think, and the sight of [Eric Hobsbawm], lifelong supporter of the Soviet Union, accepting the ultimate establishment honour, the Companion of Honour, did it..." he says, with a glum laugh (not for nothing did Scruton once write a book called The Uses of Pessimism). Scruton's political hero remains Lord Salisbury, the three-time Tory prime minister about whom nothing at all is remembered, "because he did no damage", and after whom the publication with which Scruton first came to prominence as editor, the Salisbury Review, was named. Scruton gained his conservative convictions by way of epiphany while in Paris in 1968. While his friends were out in the street breaking windows in the name of socialist revolution, he found himself bewitched reading Charles De Gaulle's argument, that civilisation is maintained "by language, religion, and high culture [and that] in times of turmoil and conquest it is those spiritual things that must be protected and reaffirmed". French philosophers, led by Jean-Paul Sartre, who had recently embraced Maoism, were asking to "throw away... all customs, institutions and achievements, for the sake of a momentary exultation which could have no lasting sense save anarchy", Scruton wrote. Since then, he has always spoken for the preservation of existing order over radical change, for tradition and stewardship against "progress".