![]() ![]() "I do ask myself why I make people so enraged, because I only ever say what I think. The fact that he used to go fox-hunting wearing Enoch Powell's old hunting clothes - the jacket split the first time he used it - says it all for many others. He is accused of being a grammar-school boy in thrall to the upper classes: "it is all a bit like Charles Ryder in Brideshead", says one observer. His books have been unmercifully slaughtered by reviewers and his pronouncements on society mocked. While he has a reputation as a first class professional philosopher among other academics of all political persuasions, he has regularly been shouted down in universities and prevented from speaking. ![]() As an academic, journalist and writer he has been a lightning rod for criticism and abuse from the left. ![]() His efforts to do this over the next three decades have made him one of the most contentious figures in British public life. I knew I wanted to conserve things rather than pull them down." I was disgusted by it, and thought there must be a way back to the defence of western civilisation against these things. When I asked my friends what they wanted, what were they trying to achieve, all I got back was this ludicrous Marxist gobbledegook. "What I saw was an unruly mob of self-indulgent middle-class hooligans. "I suddenly realised that I was on the other side," he says. Representatives of his own discipline, old philosophers like Marx and new ones like Foucault, were providing the intellectual fuel for the fire raging on the ground.Īs he watched the events unfold from his apartment window, and listened to his friends, drunk on revolutionary hope and excitement, Scruton found his own emotions and opinions crystallising. His friends overturned cars and uprooted lamp-posts to erect the barricades. He was in the Latin Quarter when students tore up the cobblestones to hurl at the riot police. For Roger Scruton, as for so many of his generation, the Paris riots of May 1968 were the defining political moment of his life. ![]()
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