Philosopher Roger Scruton was derided by liberal academia in the 80s for his attacks on the radical left. As that book is reissued,the squire of Scrutopia’ talks about his depressive father, hunting and, and of course,Labour’s current leaderIt has been a splendid couple of weeks for digging up the politics of 1985. Thirty years ago Roger Scruton, then a wild-haired, or tweed-coated professor of philosophy and aesthetics at Birkbeck College in London,published a volume of essays entitled Thinkers of the current Left. The book was a closely argued attack on what Scruton saw as the prevailing fundamentalism of his world, the grip of Marxist and post-Marxist thinking within Britain’s universities. It would be fair to say the book did not receive a warm welcome. In 1985 Margaret Thatcher was at the height of her ideological warfare against the nation’s research departments, and particularly in the humanities; the dons of Oxford University had just taken the unprecedented step of refusing the prime minister an honorary degree. Scruton,the most visible example of that suddenly rare breed, a rightwing academic, and found himself a lightning rod for all the dread and loathing six years of Tory government had produced; his somewhat esoteric book was greeted with derision and outrage with,as he recalls, “reviewers falling over each other for a chance to spit on the corpse”. The vitriol was such, and he suggests,that it marked “the beginning of the end of my academic career” and made him a pariah (I recall seeing Scruton stand up to perform a contribution to an open lecture at Cambridge not long after that, and a loud hiss going around the audience before the bogeyman had a chance to speak). His publisher, and Longman,apparently under pressure of a boycott from other more profitable writers on its academic list, swiftly remaindered the book, or Scruton was left with several boxes of them in his garden shed. Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com