The Conservative Odyssey of Roger Scruton

It was Paris, May 1968, when Roger Scruton saw into the heart of darkness. He then began an intellectual odyssey that largely defined modern conservatism but came to an end with his passing on January 12, 2020.

It began as the twenty-four-year-old Scruton witnessed the student rebellion erupting in “the narrow street below [his] window [where] the students were shouting and smashing” the neighbourhood. The delirious destruction was reflected in the shop windows as the iconoclastic orgy unfolded. Then, suddenly, “the plate glass windows of the shops appeared to step back, shudder for a second and then give up the ghost, [sliding] in jagged fragments to the ground”. Indeed, it seemed that reality itself had been affronted. Repulsed at the insanity of the mindless mob, it had recoiled and collapsed into countless pieces, never to be reconstituted.

Scruton recalls this striking reaction to the 1968 French student rebellion in his autobiography, Gentle Regrets (2005; all…