Roger Scruton - openDemocracy

Remembering Graeme Mitchison

Graeme Mitchison wrote parts of one of Ian McEwan's novels, contributed a key quote to one of Philippe Sands' International Court of Justice victories, and invented openDemocracy's rotating front-page editorship.

By Ian McEwan, Tony Curzon Price, Philippe Sands and Roger Scruton

/ 18 May 2019

Notes from the Prague underground, part 2

Part 2 of an interview around Roger Scruton's new novel, Underground Notes. The contrast between Prague in the early 1980s and Washington in the late 2000s is the backdrop for a reflection on the nature of love, freedom and necessity

By Tony Curzon Price and Roger Scruton

/ 15 Mar 2014

Notes from the Prague underground, part 2

Part 2 of an interview around Roger Scruton's new novel, Underground Notes. The contrast between Prague in the early 1980s and Washington in the late 2000s is the backdrop for a reflection on the nature of love, freedom and necessity

By Tony Curzon Price and Roger Scruton

/ 15 Mar 2014

Notes from the Prague underground, part 1

Part 1 of an interview around Roger Scruton's new novel, Underground Notes. Czechoslovakia in the early 1980s is the backdrop for an exploration of a conservative existentialism.

By Tony Curzon Price and Roger Scruton

/ 14 Mar 2014

Notes from the Prague underground, part 1

Part 1 of an interview around Roger Scruton's new novel, Underground Notes. Czechoslovakia in the early 1980s is the backdrop for an exploration of a conservative existentialism.

By Tony Curzon Price and Roger Scruton

/ 14 Mar 2014

Cameron and the future of the Union: a forum

The Prime Minister has conceded that there will be a Scottish independence referendum and argued the case for the Union on these terms. This is a historic moment for Britain. openDemocracy asks its readers for their response in an open forum on the future of the Union.

By Roger Scruton

/ 20 Feb 2012

Unreal Estate

The legal fiction of the "corporate person" has helped economic growth through making possible limited liability, fractional reserve banking, insurance and many other fictions. But it has also made it easier to divorce the moral realities of debt and obligation from economic fictions. The endless

By Roger Scruton

/ 12 Sep 2011

Leszek Kolakowski: thinker for our time

A few weeks ago I was at a dinner in Bucharest, hosted by a small centre-right think-tank, at which the discussion focused on the continuing dominance in western universities of

By Roger Scruton

/ 29 Jul 2009

Alexander Solzhenitsyn: the line within

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, like Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy, combined the gifts of a novelist with the stature and ambitions of a prophet. He may not have matched their achievements as

By Roger Scruton

/ 7 Aug 2008

Islamic law in a secular world

The response to the Archbishop of Canterbury's lecture on 7 February 2008, " Civil and Religious Law in England: a Religious Perspective", has included discussion of the

By Roger Scruton

/ 14 Feb 2008

Ingmar Bergman: the sense of the world

You can read a great novel - Nostromo, for example - and immediately, on finishing, want to read it again. You can listen to a great symphony - Bruckner'

By Roger Scruton

/ 4 Aug 2007

Richard Rorty’s legacy

Richard Rorty, who died on 8 June 2007, was a philosopher whose high reputation was bestowed on him, not by fellow philosophers, but by the many literary scholars who took

By Roger Scruton

/ 12 Jun 2007