But it was an integral part of the Scruton mode to kick against the pricks: he would later claim that the only person he could engage in conversation at Birkbeck College, where he taught before becoming a freelance man of letters, was the tea-lady, who was the only other conservative in the place.Ī similarly vigorous and embattled spirit animated his first work of political philosophy, The Meaning of Conservatism (1980), which referred to “the contagion of democracy” among other shortcomings of the age. Scruton later considered the book a professional disaster, and the beginning of the end of his life within the academy. Photograph: John Voos/The Independent/Rex/Shutterstock Roger Scruton, who had controversial views on hunting, at the Vale of the White Horse Hunt in 1992.

It is full of drolleries and iconoclastic knockabout, as when Scruton depicts a bewildered reader of the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, waiting hopefully in the corridors of his arid prose “like a petitioner to whom truth has been promised, albeit only abstractly, on a document that is perhaps already out of date”. The manner is not, as he put it, “word-mincing”. His most provocative work in that mode was probably Thinkers of the New Left (1985), a collection of intemperate pieces from the Salisbury Review, later expanded under the characteristic title Fools, Frauds and Firebrands (2015), in which he took on almost every major thinker on the left, from Althusser to Žižek. On the other, he was a brilliant polemicist, the unforgiving critic of what he took to be the charlatans of post-modernity, and a wholly self-conscious controversialist. On the one hand, he was a philosophical writer of tremendous lucidity and expository grace, whose introductions to Kant and Spinoza are exemplary, and whose studies – Sexual Desire (1986) and The Aesthetics of Music (1997) – seemed at once to be masterpieces.

Roger Scruton, who died on Sunday aged 75, was never merely clownish, but his long and immensely productive career as a public intellectual featured a distinction in roles that was not so dissimilar.

Roger scruton thinkers of the new left