1944-2020 

Like Edmund Burke and Kenneth Clarke, Roger Scruton was a typical product of that liberal British tradition that knew to combine conservatism with a lack of preconceptions, and made clarity something more than a mere courtesy to readers. Born in a hamlet of Lincolnshire in 1944, Scruton studied philosophy at Cambridge University, where he frequented conservative circles and renounced France’s May 1968, and wrote a thesis on art and imagination that would become the first of fifty books on a wide range of themes, from art, political philosophy, and religion to ecology and sex. His broad outlook also included architecture, to which he devoted books both rigorous and attractive but hard for advocates of the modern doctrine to assimilate, from the still re-editable The Aesthetics of Architecture (1979) – where he defended the objectivity of aesthetic judgments and proposed a canon coinciding with European classicism – to the polemic The Classical Vernacular: Architectural Principles in the Age of Nihilism (2009), where he upheld classicism with arguments both conservative and evocative.