Called “England’s most accomplished conservative since Edmund Burke” by The Weekly Standard, Roger Scruton has defined the movement for decades.
A philosopher who specializes in aesthetics, he has published several dozen books on philosophy, art, architecture, beauty and the environment. Critically he has written several works about the conservative movement and what being a conservative is, including The Meaning of Conservatism and How to be a Conservative.
In addition to his non-fiction work, Scruton has published a handful of novels and has even composed two operas.
A professor at Birkbeck College, London, from 1971 to 1992, he has sine served part-time at Boston University, the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., and the University of St Andrews. During the Cold War he also help found several underground universities behind the Iron Curtain.
He has founded several publications including The Salisbury Review and the Claridge Press. He is a member of the editorial board of the British Journal of Aesthetics, and a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
How to be a Conservative
In a world that seems to have abandoned conservative principles, it’s possible, and in fact necessary, to carry the torch. In How to be a Conservative Roger Scruton argues that you can live a fulfilling modern life as a Conservative and be more than just a representation of an age gone by.
In this helpful book, he makes the case that while society may endure without Conservative principles, it certainly won’t thrive in the absence of the ideas that created Western society.
Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition
The evolution of the Conservative movement along with its impact on our world and culture throughout history and in modern times, Roger Scruton has penned a convincing argument using nothing but the facts.
From the historical giants like John Locke, Thomas Hobbes and Adam Smith, to more recent thinkers like Milton Friedman, Scruton outlines how the Conservative ideology was involved in the formation of our current understanding what the West is, from the rule of law, civil society, property, rights and the role of the state in our lives. From there be details how this understanding has formulated the policies of leaders from Thomas Jefferson to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
It’s a quick yet surprisingly comprehensive overview of what Conservatism is, as well as an invitation to join it based on its principles and practical benefits.
How to Think Seriously About the Planet: The Case for an Environmental Conservatism
The environmentalist agenda has been coopted by the Left. But it shouldn’t be.
That’s the rather controversial statement that Roger Scruton makes, arguing that, for starters, conservation of the environment is a fundamentally Conservative idea. But where Scruton really digs in, is on the idea that local solutions and small-scale practical reasoning are fundamentally better at solving environmental issues.
Rather than global agreements or ceding power to massive NGOs, personal responsibility and local control are the best tactics to effectively solving environmental issues in a truly sustainable way.
The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat
A call for the West to reexamine itself, Roger Scruton makes the case based on a fundamental difference between Western and Islamic societies.
While Islam may lack a notion of a social contract or the idea of secular authority, it does satiate one main desire of the human condition: the need to belong.
Meanwhile, the West is self-destructing, attacking its own values related belonging such as patriotism, religious belief and traditional life. At its core, the West is eroding itself at a critical time when, through modern technology, the West and the Rest are intersecting like never before.
As a result, now is the time for the West to re-examine how it thinks about those things, as well as notions of borders, free markets and multiculturalism, or it risks its own demise.
Art and Imagination (1974)
The Aesthetics of Architecture (1979)
The Meaning of Conservatism (1980)
The Politics of Culture and Other Essays (1981)
From Descartes to Wittgenstein: A Short History of Modern Philosophy (1981)
A Dictionary of Political Thought (1982)
The Aesthetic Understanding (1983)
Kant (1983)
Untimely Tracts (1985)
Thinkers of the New Left (1985)
Sexual Desire: A Moral Philosophy of the Erotic (1986)
Spinoza (1987)
A Land Held Hostage: Lebanon and the West (1987)
The Philosopher on Dover Beach and Other Essays (1989)
Conservative Texts (1992)
Modern Philosophy (1994)
The Classical Vernacular: Architectural Principles in an Age of Nihilism (1995)
Animal Rights and Wrongs (1996)
An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Philosophy (1996); republished in 2005 as Philosophy: Principles and Problems
The Aesthetics of Music (1997)
An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture (1998)
On Hunting (1998)
Spinoza (1998)
England: An Elegy (2001)
The West and the Rest: Globalisation and the Terrorist Threat (2002)
Death-Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde (Oxford University Press, 2004)
News from Somewhere: On Settling (2004)
The Need for Nations (2004)
Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life (2005)
Animal Rights and Wrongs (2006)
A Political Philosophy: Arguments for Conservatism (2006)
Immigration, Multiculturalism and the Need to Defend the Nation State (2006)
Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged (2007)
Dictionary of Political Thought (2007)
Beauty (2009)
I Drink Therefore I Am: A Philosopher’s Guide to Wine (2009)
Understanding Music (2009)
The Uses of Pessimism: And the Danger of False Hope (2010)
Green Philosophy (2011)
The Roger Scruton Reader (2011)
How to Think Seriously About the Planet: The Case for an Environmental Conservatism (2012)
The Face of God: The Gifford Lectures (2012)
Our Church: A Personal History of the Church of England (2012)
The Soul of the World (2014)
How to Be a Conservative (2014)
Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left (2015)
The Ring of Truth: The Wisdom of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung (2016)
Conversations with Roger Scruton (2016)
Confessions of a Heretic: Selected Essays (2016)
On Human Nature (2017)
Conservatism: Ideas in Profile (2017)
The State of Britain Now (2017)
Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition (2018)
Music as an Art (2018)
Wagner’s Parsifal: The Music of Redemption (2020)
Fiction Fortnight’s Anger: a novel (1981)
Francesca: a novel (1991)
A Dove Descending and Other Stories (1991)
Xanthippic Dialogues (1993)
Perictione in Colophon (2000)
Notes from Underground (2014)
The Disappeared (2015)
Souls in the Twilight (2018)
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