Sunday Spotlight: Sir Roger Scruton

Sir Roger Scruton was perhaps the greatest conservative philosopher of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A polymath who wrote over fifty books, Scruton was a First Things author and is the subject of an essay by Dan Hitchens in the October 2026 issue of the magazine. From the archives, three articles by Roger Scruton.

FROM THE DECEMBER 2014 ISSUE

Is Sex Necessary?

ROGER SCRUTON

As society retreats from the vestigial experience of the sacred and the forbidden, we easily imagine that sex has nothing especially to do with love, and that it has lost its sacramental aura.

FROM THE DECEMBER 2015 ISSUE

Living with a Mind

ROGER SCRUTON

My teachers made it abundantly clear, in their behavior as much as in their explicit instruction, that intellectual enjoyment is an end in itself, which needs no utilitarian excuse, and which is not to be shunned or condemned merely because it leads to no evident career.

FROM THE JUNE 2014 ISSUE

The Good of Government

ROGER SCRUTON

American conservatives seem to be losing sight of the truth that government is not only natural to the human condition, but an expression of those extended loyalties over time, which bind generation to generation in a relation of mutual commitment.