Roger Scruton became himself as a thinker and a man at about the same time, in 1980. That year, he published his third book, his most important political book, The Meaning of Conservatism. He also formalized his activity behind the Iron Curtain by founding the Jan Hus Foundation (named for the most famous Bohemian theologian, a dissenter tried for heresy and burned at the stake), with some friends and supporters in Britain. As the name suggests, the purpose of the foundation was political subversion—bringing down the Communist tyranny in Czechoslovakia, through the modest means of educating a counter-elite.

I would like to insist on this paradox, that Scruton found more freedom of thought and, in private life, even the spirit of freedom of speech among people who lived in fear of the political police than he did in his native England. The Meaning of Conservatism, not sufficiently studied by conservatives, even in his native England, helped ruin Scruton’s academic career, given the regnant left-wing ideology of that period, which allowed for remarkable censorship. Meanwhile, in Czechoslovakia, as well as in Poland and Hungary, Scruton has had a remarkable influence and remains beloved and honored publicly at the highest levels.

Indeed, Scruton in England was one of the early victims of what we called “political correctness” in his day. Nowadays, we call it “cancelation” and Scruton was again a victim of it in that guise at the end of his life, too, being humiliated in the press by a reporter with slanderous accusations of racism and betrayed by his Tory party, fired from an appointed position concerning architecture. My guess is that the stifling intellectual and moral climate of the left-wing English elites prepared him and perhaps made him welcome the ordeal of Communist tyranny as a more honest enemy.

I draw an obvious conclusion from this problem: Ideas lend themselves to ideology. The home of the ideas is the university, but also the press and the modern state, both of which are staffed by educated people. Ideology, in turn, runs on propaganda. The West faces the petty tyranny of ideologists and propagandists today, but it was faced on a far more terrible scale first by the victims of Communism. Freedom of speech is a danger to tyranny partly because it encourages men to action, when they complain of injustice and learn they have right and numbers on their side, but partly if it encourages men to think freely. Scruton attempted to put the two together in his activity behind the Iron Curtain.

Central Europe and Conservatism

In Europe East of the Iron Curtain, daring came at a premium and writers mattered—from Havel to Solzhenitsyn, a number of impressive men of letters emerged that have no correlatives in the free democracies. One reason why is that in the West philosophy means almost nothing. It’s a joke or a job, or both, having nothing to do with the kinds of things that people live or die for.

Scruton makes a revealing remark about this strange situation in Gentle Regrets, his autobiography. He says he was like an “air raid horn” coming into people’s lives. It’s a wonderful phrase. He was a shy man, yet funny. He brought danger with him, interrupting people’s lives, causing trouble in a way—every time he showed up in Prague or Brno, suddenly the political police were interested. Eventually, of course, the Communists kicked him out of Czechoslovakia and banned him for subversion of the regime. And they were right, though too late.

Scruton’s work helped set the foundation in some places for democracy—for a decent way of life, and perhaps, as he hoped, for the rebirth or the restoration of ways of life that were older even than modernity.

But of course, Scruton was an air raid that people were interested in, longing for. He was not an embarrassment. The urgency of his mission to bring in educational material, speakers from the West who cared and would act to help people free themselves, as well as technology for communications—that went hand in hand with his educational mission and dedication to learning, an example that proved unforgettable for many people. The Communist tyranny was trying to kick him out precisely because so many among the oppressed elites, on the educational side, but also political, were trying to welcome him in. Only in that context did the love of truth seem to matter.

It might be why, in a certain way, Europe east of the Iron Curtain is more interesting now than Europe west of it. There is something sad in the fate of the old empires of Europe that ran the world a century back, the old great nations like England or France, reduced to self-destruction by ideology. Culturally, these countries are in agony and public discourse and state activity are their cemetery. These states import woke ideology from America, but cannot offer a life fit for human beings for their citizens, that is, they cannot offer impressive aspiration. These peoples are disinherited by their own states, and there is no public pursuit of the truth either. They offer a semblance of political and intellectual life under the Iron Curtain, accomplished, which was never thought possible before, without the mass murder or expropriation.

Communities of Life and Faith

Europe east of the Iron Curtain is more interesting because life there has been concerned with the most interesting thing there is in politics: foundations. Scruton’s work helped set the foundation in some places for democracy, as we say, for a decent way of life, and perhaps, as he hoped, for the rebirth or the restoration of ways of life that were older even than modernity.

The cities Scruton visited in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary—they show us a world older than modernity, a world older than Enlightenment, always in tension with the Enlightenment transformations of the state, of politics, of education, yet also always immediately attractive to all and somehow claiming a right to our affection at the same time. These were once communities of life as well as of faith, the proudest achievement of civilization in those times, yet somehow aware that that achievement is not simply due to human willfulness.

And often, this tension has been fruitful, it has made us active, sent us searching for self-understanding and self-government. And sometimes it has been, of course, terrifying—we cannot forget the twentieth-century tyrannies. Scruton directly faced the Communist-Enlightenment Project, which turned out to be nothing but brutality.

Scruton sought in his activity in Central Europe for something that withstands ideology and perhaps for hope that the higher things in human beings can be defended or restored when lost. The Catholics he found in Poland in Lublin gave him examples of human dignity, and the deep need for intellectual dissent from the tyranny that he found in Prague and Brno in Czechoslovakia. He found in those places traditions that he thought spoke to who the peoples he was encountering for the first time really were. In what he called “the sleeping cities” of Central Europe, he saw a way of life which people might gather into in such a way that they would be free perhaps of some of the worst transformations of modernization.

Espionage and Founding

Now, perhaps the most interesting thing about Scruton’s activity underground is how it changed him, giving him an experience apparently unavailable in a democracy. Scruton had such a love of the truth that, he wrote in his autobiography, every time he went beyond the Iron Curtain, he felt the oppression, he felt the misery that people were suffering, and he suffered along with them. He became more interesting through suffering. He acquired the depth that maybe he didn’t have before, that he had not articulated before. His love of truth became much more interesting once it became paradoxical, once he had to learn tradecraft, that is to say, once he became a bit of a spy.

Scruton and his collaborators had to organize charities intended to subvert Communist regimes. Organizations that required smuggling, couriers, endless casual lies, double dealing, and false identities, and of course, precaution, deception, avoidance of the political police—who eventually arrested and threw out quite a number of his collaborators. How could a man who loves truth involve himself in such natural deceptions? How could a man of peace involve himself in dangers, violence, the threat of life and death? This daring is connected to the advantage I mentioned before—having the experience, which no one in the West possesses, of founding a political order.

In other places, the political order is so old that it’s taken for granted or, indeed, forgotten. And it was not prepared usually by people who had a serious concern and an intelligent concern with political science, with higher education, with ideas, often Enlightenment ideas, which is what Scruton offered people through his educational endeavors in Central Europe.

Scruton was dedicated to freedom in a comprehensive sense, but worked specifically for that aspect of freedom we call education. And we can judge by the results here. Every honor that the now free states in Central Europe could bestow, they have bestowed on him. One reason is that a number of the important politicians were connected with the seminars he helped organize, or benefited from the public international support he drummed up—moral support for the cause of freedom in the subjugated half of Europe.

Judging by that success, what it means to create a regime, to be there at the founding, to prepare indeed the founders of a regime, that could be said to be the highest task of philosophy, to be in a sense an educator of legislators, an educator of politicians, an educator of the people who have to take responsibility in each generation for the way of life that they are elected or appointed or otherwise come to care for. That, I think, is what made him at home behind the Iron Curtain, where foundational questions were taken seriously, they were experienced, and people took personal and collective risks, they acted on the strength of their belief in their leaders and faced the uncertainty of events without delusions of Progress or of a system supplanting human activity.

Education for Rule

In my interviews with the people Scruton met in Central Europe and his collaborators, I’ve heard them say they would look at Scruton, listen to him, and wonder what they were doing with their lives and what might be possible for them given a certain help, given a certain inspiration, and given the trust that came from the evidence that, year after year, Scruton would come back—year after year, the interest in the West, because of him, partly, would grow. Therefore, the two halves of Europe, so to speak, were not permanently separated.

That gave people, as I say, not just hope, but experience, education, and ambition. I think Scruton had a certain daring of thought and even eagerness to risk his safety, career, and perhaps even his life. Communism, indeed, was not so dangerous in Czechoslovakia or Poland in the 1980s, but people still died, and one didn’t know when something terrible might happen.

Commercial and political freedom were always connected in Scruton’s mind and in his activity with deeper concerns.

The need for courage was real, but it is not only physical or moral courage, it is also intellectual courage. Scruton’s The Meaning of Conservatism is a reflection on what community—which is defined by its laws—means. These are not themes that are treated in law schools in any democracy in the world; they are simply taken for granted. But in Scruton’s writing, he took the question seriously, as one would find it, for example, in the speeches of the statesman Kleinias in Plato’s Laws.

In Central Europe, the question did become urgent and practical, not merely something one would write or have an academic conference about—that was a large part of the attraction of the place. Scruton was a man of action, not just a man of letters: in fact, he was a man of action because he was a man of letters. He acted on his thoughts in a way that most do not, which is why he is admired as an intellectual, whereas most academics don’t matter. This is an unacknowledged danger, to some extent their activity is suffused with that irrelevance. Our forefathers used to say, the devil will find work for idle hands to do.

The Dangers of Democracy

Scruton’s lack of reputation or a school in Britain or here in America, where he taught for a while and where he is much admired by respectable conservatives, is a strange fact very revealing of our weakness. It reminds us that it’s dangerous to try to break out of institutional boundaries. It can lead to career suicide, or worse things. It is a sad, dishonorable matter worth considering, given Scruton’s great love for and his dedication of himself to his country.

Scruton is least reputed of all among young men, who are increasingly of the opinion that he was soft or even foolish, though they have never tried anything as dangerous or adventurous as what Scruton did. This is somewhat like the contempt some express for Tolkien as a milquetoast writer forever insisting the good guys will honorably defeat the evil; yet Tolkien fought in the trenches in World War I and demonstrated physical courage—just as Scruton did behind the Iron Curtain. I fear, though, that Scruton’s reputation is now a balm to older men and women, hence this rejection by the young. It’s as though he were reduced to a balmy, not to say oleaginous Anglican preacher without a church.

We must first of all then learn again about Scruton’s daring, to imitate him in his love of freedom and love of truth, to connect words to deeds again, to reflect on education in light of experience—on experience in light of the greatest tasks to which we are called as free men. Because we, and especially younger men, must face at home the troubles he went abroad in search of when he was a young man.

Scruton, after the annus miraibilis 1989, encouraged his friends in Eastern Europe to each take their nation seriously, to take their way of life seriously, to take their cultural and spiritual activities seriously, and not simply to be steamrolled by globalization. He never left it at preaching economics or even democracy. The commercial freedom of the market and the political freedom of democracy, of citizenship, voting, and representative institutions, were always connected in his mind and in his activity with deeper concerns: the way of life that is reflected in a historical continuity and, therefore, the resources that a people might call on in their times of trouble.

Of course, at the core of that are spiritual questions about what it means to be human, how nature becomes property, if one wishes to speak economics, or if religion, on the divine foundation of all law, the belief that as human beings we are ensouled and therefore are in some way involved in providence, that our activities are not merely like the weather or of asteroids in the night sky. Being human, he called it with modesty and daring, in the old way, the soul. That is to say, for us, the questions are always what to live and what to die for, what will people believe and what will they know. These are the questions Scruton asked and worked at answering in his books and his activity. We have to do likewise.