https://firstthings.com/the-making-of-roger-scruton/
EXCERPTS: Cambridge, October 1964. A new undergraduate named Mary Hoffman is sitting in the corner at a party, feeling sorry for herself. She doesn’t know anybody, the friends she arrived with have disappeared, and she is just about to go home when a third-year student comes over to introduce himself. He has flame-red hair and craggy features that put her in mind of the nouvelle vague heartthrob Jean-Paul Belmondo.
And as they talk, it dawns on her that she’s never met anybody like this in her life. [...] At the age of twenty, he seems to have the world at his feet ... that year they become, in an on-and-off way, boyfriend and girlfriend. Sixty-two years later, she shares her reminiscences with me.
[...] Not that anybody believes her. “When I tell people I used to go out with Roger Scruton they say, ‘What?!’ And I say: ‘Ah, but you don’t know what he was like when he was twenty.’”
People who knew Scruton in his early years have sometimes asked themselves the question Hoffman now puts to herself: What on earth happened to him? Within a few decades, the kind, sweet-natured, and apolitical young man had become perhaps Britain’s most hated thinker, a granite-faced provocateur known for his fierce conservatism, his sympathy for Mrs. Thatcher, and his taste for foxhunting.
[...] The question of Scruton’s intellectual development has a broader interest, too. His mind was formed by the experience of the 1960s, the decade in which the modern world came of age.
And Scruton is, without compare, the intellectual renegade of Europe’s ’60s generation—progenitor of a highly sophisticated conservative philosophy not only of politics, but of law, religion, culture, sex, music, architecture, the environment, the nation, and a dozen other subjects. No author has done more to shape the imagination of the European right, from Viktor Orbán and Giorgia Meloni to much of the leadership of both Reform U.K. and the Conservative Party.
From where, one wonders, did this extraordinary and unique figure—“a rebel against rebellion,” as he called himself—emerge?
[...] Scruton’s case exacerbated by his relationship with his father, Jack, a primary school teacher and class warrior who was the local rep for the National Union of Teachers. ... Age fourteen, Roger subscribed to the Daily Worker, simply because the socialist Jack loathed Soviet communism ... At other times Roger would mercilessly probe his father’s political philosophy (“So, Dad, justice doesn’t mean equality?”) until Jack stomped off ... The father-son relationship was “just awful,” says Grillo, who dated the teenage Scruton.
[...] For a teenager who knew he was unusually gifted and energetic and yet was wracked with uncertainty, Nietzsche’s amoral individualism had a seductive appeal. Nietzsche viewed pity for the weak as a morbid hangover from Christianity; Scruton was tempted to agree, until one day he saw High Wycombe’s town bookseller, a disabled man, struggling to carry a load of books from his car. Scruton simply could not feel contempt for this faithful servant of literary culture. Nevertheless, the Nietzschean spirit-the reckless individualism, the willingness to shock and provoke-was part of Scruton’s makeup.
[...] He was rescued ... by discovering Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. ... The other key influence from his studies, and probably the major inspiration for Scruton as a philosopher, was Immanuel Kant. ... More generally, Cambridge philosophy gave Scruton a sense of the distinction between real thinking and fake thinking, a BS detector that alerted him to dud arguments.
[...] He used the money to go to Rome, hoping to write a novel. On that trip Scruton discovered that he was more a bourgeois than a bohemian. ... Scruton took other, less traumatic, memories from Rome. He had visited Bernard Brown and his girlfriend Maria-Teresa, a couple who would remain his close friends all his life. Scruton and Maria-Teresa toured the churches of the city, seeing Bernini’s sculptures, Cavallini’s frescoes, and Borromini’s churches—one of which, San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, the older Scruton would name as his favorite building.
Maria-Teresa was astonished at Scruton’s aesthetic perceptiveness, his understanding of light and structure. “Do you realize,” she asked Bernard, “your friend Roger is a genius?” Scruton, for his part, was astonished by the beauty all around him and its contrast with the hippies’ empty politics. He was starting to draw conclusions about where his allegiance lay.
One fellow Cambridge philosophy student believes it was around now that Scruton decided he was on the right. The undergraduate Scruton had been an “unremarkable left-liberal” in his politics, like 95 percent of his contemporaries. But coming back from Italy, the student says, “Roger knew he wanted to be a right-wing intellectual.” So around 1966 the student introduced him to the most pronounced conservative in his circle, the literary critic John Casey...
[...] In May 1968, then, as he visited Danielle in Paris, with his friends spending their days on the barricades, what Scruton saw shocked him. The atmosphere of that month was genuinely revolutionary. Ordinary life practically stopped, replaced by strikes, occupations, demonstrations, meetings, and spontaneous theater events. The entire city seemed to be involved in a mass political conference.
[...] When the bricks started hitting the windows and the cars went up in flames, Scruton felt, at one level, a “literary critical” distaste: The whole performance was shallow and vulgar. More viscerally, he experienced an anger, a desire to fight back on behalf of what was most precious to him.
[...] And so we come to the celebrated moment, described many times and most vividly in Gentle Regrets, when looking down from the little flat on the Rue de Bérite, Scruton recoiled with all his mind and heart from the revolutionary spirit of 1968. Probing his friends’ politics in the following days, he became convinced that whatever he believed, it was the opposite of that. “I came back to Cambridge,” he once said, “determined to reanimate a political outlook for the modern world.” (MORE - missing details)
