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If you could be transported back 50 years, to the London of 1974, where would you choose to be a fly on the wall? Surely at 52 Campden Hill Square in Holland Park, the home of Sir Hugh Fraser — the charismatic war hero, Scottish aristocrat and Tory MP — and his wife Lady Antonia, the historian, writer and part-time society beauty.

At a Fraser party, Hugh’s right-wing friends and Antonia’s left-wing ones would socialise with writers, bohemians and arts-world panjandrums. Posh Catholics rubbed shoulders with sweary, shaven-headed actors. And in one corner you might find a quartet laughing, debating and — though none of them would have put it so pompously — fostering a revival of intellectual Toryism.

They were a striking group: Hugh Fraser himself, a longstanding critic of the Heath leadership now entering its terminal crisis; Fraser’s friend Jonathan Aitken, an eager new MP dismayed by the gloomy atmosphere amongst the parliamentary party; the Cambridge don John Casey, a formidable mind and a candidate for the original Young Fogey; and Casey’s protégé, a quiet, red-headed 30-year-old who had just published his philosophy PhD in book form, and whose fame would one day grow too great for England to contain.

In 1974 Roger Scruton was still finding his way. Along with the PhD, he had written a handful of book reviews for the Spectator, where his friend Maurice Cowling had briefly been literary editor, and a few technical philosophy articles. At Birkbeck, where he started as a lecturer in 1971, the students had taken a while to suss him out.

The young Scruton was one of those people whose reserve can be mistaken for aloofness. “He had a slight habit of dropping his eyes when spoken to,” says Frank Palmer, then a Birkbeck undergraduate. “My first impression was ‘inscrutable Scruton’”. But when some of the students were sitting around saying the new lecturer seemed “cold or even hard-hearted”, they were interrupted by a postgraduate who had known Scruton at Cambridge, and who told them that “Roger may seem hard on the surface, but inside he is just the opposite — kind and sensitive”.

Jonathan Aitken thought him “very shy. Shy but steely”. Already Scruton knew what he believed: ever since spending May 1968 in Paris — when, as has often been recounted, he watched the ecstatic scenes of student rebellion and realised he was on the other side — he had thought of himself as a conservative.

The philosopher David Papineau, Scruton’s student in Cambridge from 1968–69, recalls that even then “he had his persona and attitudes formed”. He was “rather sniffy”, for instance, when King’s College announced in 1969 that it would go co-ed. By the time Scruton was teaching Palmer in the early seventies, he was already developing his line in deadpan provocations. “People who are not repressed are unbearable,” went one typical remark. “They go around expressing themselves all over the place.”

In 1971, when Scruton arrived at Birkbeck, his new colleagues — who came to work in t-shirts and jeans — were amused to meet this young right-winger in a jacket and tie, plus occasional yellow waistcoat and pocket watch. Given an office in the department’s newly-acquired building on Gower Street, he asked Birkbeck not to bother furnishing the room, but just give him the cash to spend at auction houses.

He covered the floor in Persian rugs, installed what his then colleague Dorothy Edgington describes as “a very elaborate desk”, and restored the boarded-up fireplace to working order. Another colleague’s wife was heard to say that the office resembled “a boudoir on the Champs-Élysées”.

Meanwhile, he was searching for the meaning of conservatism — the title of the book he would write at the end of the decade. Until his mid-twenties he had been uninterested in politics, and so the work had to be done consciously. Naturally, he looked to Edmund Burke, who had also been horrified by a Parisian uprising, and whose Reflections on the Revolution in France helped Scruton establish where he differed from his lefty contemporaries.

Burke, on Scruton’s reading, exposed the secret delusions behind the apparent rationality of the liberal mind. Does the neat idea of the “social contract”, for instance, actually have any relation to how people think and feel about their country? Is authority always suspect, or is it the thing that keeps a free society happily ticking over? Are traditions and popular assumptions to be fearlessly put to the test, or are they the best place to look for political wisdom?

As Scruton would express it many years later, Burke was critiquing “a wholly abstract vision of the human mind” with “only the vaguest relation to the thoughts and feelings by which real human lives are conducted”.

That suspicion of abstract rationalism is central to post-war conservative thought. The Telegraph journalist T.E. Utley decried “the belief that life consists of a number of problems which will yield to an organised assault from reason, which assault the intelligentsia exists to deliver”. The philosopher Michael Oakeshott wrote against the idea that politics consisted in “solving problems” or in a “superimposed plan”; rather, it is a matter of protecting the “vast and subtle body of rights and duties” which we have inherited.

At 52 Campden Hill Square, Scruton was beginning to construct his own version of those arguments. “He took my consciousness and Hugh Fraser’s into realms which we just hadn’t been in before,” says Aitken. “He had deep wells of feeling about the country, the nation-state, Englishness, values; and unlike anyone else I ever knew, he put them into highfalutin intellectual thoughts. Some of which, I hope, I absorbed.” Hugh Fraser would say admiringly: “Really clever bugger.”

Fraser was an unusual figure in the mid-seventies Tory party: a serious thinker and an economic radical. In his proposals to liberalise exchange controls, his willingness to limit state help for nationalised industries, his Euroscepticism and his distaste for “the politics of envy”, he anticipated much of Thatcherism at a time when Thatcher herself was still toeing a cautious political line.

“Hugh, usually over dinner in Campden Hill Square, used to say all this stuff,” Aitken laughs, “and the only people who agreed with him completely were John Casey, Scruton and myself.” When, in January 1975, Fraser entered the Tory leadership contest, the quartet became a campaign team, discussing policies and writing articles.

Aitken recalls: “It was all extremely amateurish and light-hearted. ‘Have another pot of Burgundy.’ Scruton saying: ‘I don’t think Burke would approve of that paragraph.’ A lot of laughter.” Up against the party’s dominant figure, Ted Heath, and its new star Margaret Thatcher, they were unlikely contenders. “Hugh, unbelievably, thought he was a serious challenger. I kept saying, ‘I don’t think you’ll get more than 40 votes.’ Hugh would say, ‘Don’t be so pessimistic.’ He actually got 16.”

Fraser was thoroughly dejected, but the quartet recovered their spirits over “an enormously jolly dinner” and decided to expand the group. Casey and Scruton would find conservative academics, Aitken and Fraser would bring in Tory politicians, and sympathetic journalists would be invited along. The Hugh Fraser Group was born.

The first event, at which the historian Robert Blake gave a sparkling, meticulously prepared talk, was an unexpected success. Even so, the venture might soon have petered out, had Thatcher not heard about it and been intrigued. She came only three times as leader of the opposition, and once as PM. But the rumour always went round that she might be there; which meant that everyone else wanted to come too.

Soon the group moved to bigger premises nearby: at Phillimore Gardens, where Aitken lived in a flat at the top of his mother’s house and borrowed her drawing room. Every month or six weeks, around 40 guests would arrive: academics such as Anthony Quinton and Norman Stone; journalists such as William Rees-Mogg and Paul Johnson; politicians such as Kenneth Baker and John Biffen. A distinguished speaker list featured, amongst many others, Richard Nixon, Milton Friedman and Hugh Trevor-Roper. By now the Hugh Fraser Group had become “the CPG”: the Conservative Philosophy Group.

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There could probably never have been such a thing if not for Peterhouse, the oldest, smallest and at the time most notorious of Cambridge colleges. Its reactionary image was one reason Scruton chose to do a research fellowship there from 1969–71. The college had a way of producing prominent right-wing journalists — George Gale, Peregrine Worsthorne, Colin Welch, Patrick Cosgrave — which indicated a deep core of unfashionable thinking.

Over decades it had maintained a political tradition of scepticism, indeed of anti-rationalism: a resistance to grand theories, detached from the grain of experience, runs through such Peterhouse productions as Herbert Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation of History (1931) and David Watkin’s architectural criticism of the 1970s.

Nobody exemplified that spirit more than the historian Maurice Cowling, whose sinister charisma and pedagogical gifts held two generations of undergraduates spellbound. Cowling’s intellect, Scruton would write, “was an immense negative force, which could undermine any conviction and pour scorn on any emotional attachment”. Above all he reserved his contempt for liberalism — a far more serious ailment than Marxism, he believed.

Some found Cowling’s scepticism nihilistic, and the 70s Peterhouse milieu even worse — a sink of vicious gossip, semi-ironic racism and recreational cruelty. (Cowling once ignored a high table guest sitting next to him for some time, before opening the conversation with: “From the moment you sat down, I knew you were a shit.”)

Scruton was never exactly part of that scene, but he learned something from Peterhouse: from Cowling, “a profound moral seriousness that would not allow itself the luxury of illusions”; from the college, a willingness to take the fight to the left. Cambridge “taught me not only to think unpopular things, but to say them”.

The most important Cambridge connection was with someone who mostly steered clear of the Peterhouse set: the English don John Casey. In 1965, when they met, Scruton was a third-year undergraduate, Casey already a fellow of Caius College. Casey recollects the first time he set eyes on Scruton: “this incredibly handsome young man with reddish auburn hair, black corduroy jacket, holding hands with a girl”.

Casey was at the time a “ferociously proselytising Tory”, so perhaps Scruton’s 1968 conversion did not come entirely out of the blue. But at the time he had little interest in politics: their intense friendship began with listening together to Wagner’s Ring. In 1973, when Scruton married Danielle Laffitte in a low-key ceremony at the Brompton Oratory, the only guests were a friend of Danielle’s and Casey as best man.

Casey’s influence was profound. He argued, in a way which The Meaning of Conservatism would echo, for the necessity of tradition — a dynamic source of values, something to which an individual can submit whilst reshaping the tradition itself.

And he pointed the younger man towards Hegel, who became one of Scruton’s heroes: the 19th century philosopher who understood 20th century alienation. For Scruton, as his literary executor Mark Dooley has argued, Hegel showed that conservatism could be as metaphysically well-grounded as any of the alternatives.

Casey also articulated a series of questions about art, morality and emotion which would prove fundamental to Scruton’s thought. When I decide that a painting or symphony is poignant, or thrilling, or sentimental, what precisely am I talking about? Is it a wholly “subjective” judgement, or could I persuade you to agree with me? And does any of this actually have the slightest importance, to the individual or to society?

Such issues were the subject of Scruton’s first book, as they were of Casey’s; both works possess a complexity putting them beyond reach of a brief summary. But a couple of Scruton’s conclusions, as he thought these matters over in the 1970s, are worth noting. The first is that art really matters, because it communicates a kind of knowledge: knowledge about how to feel, about the right emotional response to being bereaved, say, or being insulted. That kind of knowledge is part of our moral education. But it can only be learnt from culture, in both senses — from works of art, and from the institutions and expectations which surround us. “A man’s culture,” Scruton wrote in the journal Philosophy in 1979, “determines what he is, what he feels, what he does and how he sees himself.” And Scruton began to draw out a major political implication: individual “freedom of choice” is not enough. Before we can choose the right thing, we have to belong to a culture.

Casey was the dominant figure in the friendship, but he learnt from Scruton too. When Casey began editing the Cambridge Review in 1975, turning this rather sleepy journal into a platform for attacks on modern architecture, university reformers and liberal ecclesiastics, the pair collaborated on articles; often Casey was more intuitive, Scruton more philosophically systematic.

Even as a somewhat rebellious undergraduate, Casey says, Scruton had a deep “piety” — a reverence towards apparently ordinary things. “When we first went on holiday, we went to Venice, and he made sure we stayed in the place where Ruskin stayed. It’s that sort of piety for the past.” Above all, for the England in which Scruton had grown up, the townscapes and landscapes he had watched being trashed by the developers.

“When he became conservative,” says Casey, “it was all very natural to him. It all came from this piety towards the environment, buildings … and sex. He was very conservative about sex.”

His and Casey’s first co-written piece in the Cambridge Review was a denunciation of pornography, which, they wrote, “aims to strip the sexual act of any distinctive human significance”. Here, already, were the seeds of Scruton’s qualified defence of traditional sexual morality. “He came in with the Hegelian stuff,” says Casey. “I did the jokes.”

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“There’s one adjective nobody ever uses about Scruton,” says Aitken. “A French adjective: ‘serviable’. ‘Anxious to please.’ He was charming. He had exquisite manners.” At the CPG, amidst the Oxbridge dons, senior politicians and famous journalists, Scruton spoke little, encouraged others, and often gave his attention to the less distinguished guests. “He was nervous that somebody or other from Bristol University, thought of as below the salt, was going to feel out of place.”

The format was originally devised by Antonia Fraser. Guests would arrive between 6 and 7 for a glass of wine; at 7.30, everyone would take their seats in a circle of chairs, and the speaker, also seated, would read a paper. After a short break to get supper from the buffet, everyone would return to their seats for a Q&A, helped along by more wine.

The formal discussion would end at 9.30; but people liked to hang around even after the host had gone to bed, and in the morning the butler would remark on the difficulty of getting everybody out of the door. “This is a style of entertaining which has gone from the Tory Party,” says Aitken. “There were still people who had biggish houses in central London.”

What felt new, he says, was that the two tribes — the intellectuals and the Tory MPs — had never really encountered each other. “You only had to hear one or two of these top academics to realise this was much better than anything you would hear in the House of Commons.” Sometimes the professors simply baffled the politicians; the Glasgow MP Teddy Taylor declared he would never again waste his time on “such bloody rubbish”.

But for others an evening of high-minded discussion was their idea of a good time. Thatcher was one of them. As Charles Moore shows in his biography, she believed, to an extent unusual amongst Tories of the time, that the battle of ideas had to be won. And she had a curiosity — an insecurity, perhaps — towards intellectuals. “This is fun, isn’t it?” she would say to nobody in particular as the debate heated up.

An argument between Thatcher and Wade grew so heated that Oakeshott set off an attempted diversion

By all accounts it really was fun: the kind of meeting, says John Casey, that you would look forward to coming round again in the calendar. Hugh Fraser, with his aristocratic wit and “tremendous bonhomie”, had a lot to do with that. So did the occasional absurdity. Once, Nixon was seated next to the maverick zoo owner and gambling impresario John Aspinall; through some misapprehension, the former President spent the evening respectfully referring to “Professor Aspinall”, to the suppressed hilarity of the other guests. Then there was the time an argument broke out between Thatcher and the legal scholar H.W.R. Wade, which grew so heated that Oakeshott, in an attempted diversion, set off a singing bird box. Thatcher simply continued her fusillade over the sound of birdsong.

According to Casey, Scruton wanted the group to have more influence, to be something like a think tank, but that was never really on the cards. For Aitken, “We were not there with a great purpose. It both was serious and wasn’t serious.” It had, he says, the spirit of friendship: simple enjoyment of each other’s company, without wondering about its impact.

When Scruton came to write The Meaning of Conservatism, he would make much of this kind of institution: the kind that is, in a sense, pointless. A football team, for instance, “is not a means to the end of scoring goals”. You don’t support a team because you have some object in mind; you just belong to it, share its identity, and so take on its values of “loyalty, courage, competition, endurance”.

The Tory intellectual revival of the 1970s itself exemplifies the point. It was, to a remarkable extent, driven by coteries, by little groups of friends trying to have a good time and only accidentally having influence. Of course, there were free-marketeers who explicitly wanted to reshape politics: the Institute for Economic Affairs was publishing endless pamphlets and hosting lunches for politicians and journalists, whilst the Centre for Policy Studies wrote speeches for Thatcher and came up with policy proposals.

Yet alongside and overlapping with that story was a different kind of enterprise. The original, perhaps, began in the late 1960s in the little village of Wivenhoe in Essex, where the future Spectator editor George Gale and his wife Pat lived in a ménage à trois with Maurice Cowling. Peregrine Worsthorne, like Gale a Peterhouse-educated journalist, moved to Wivenhoe too; social life there became a magnet for politicians and intellectuals — not least Oakeshott, who fell in love with Pat Gale and thus converted the love triangle into a square.

Worsthorne remembered Wivenhoe as a “bohemian blur”, terms echoed by John Casey. “It was a complete vie de bohème,” he says: a “galère of journalists and sex maniacs,” fuelled by heavy drinking and presided over by Pat herself, the undisputed Queen of Wivenhoe. “She was mad and brilliant and uneducated — ‘Wot’s an adjective?’, that sort of thing. She had a big influence on a lot of people. She would have been, except she was too wild, a grand hostess in the old days.” Scruton, with his piety and his respect for bourgeois normality, was not entirely won over by the Wivenhoe crowd. “You think we’re hell, don’t you?” Pat challenged him once. “You are purgatory,” Scruton replied.

On the other hand, the Wivenhoe set “liked him a lot”. He had, already, that power of fascination which he would never lose. The young Scruton “was a very striking-looking man”, Casey recalls. “He had a huge effect on everybody. A magnificent face. Noble, really.” Lady Antonia Fraser, endorsing that description, adds: “Like something painted with poster paints. Huge blue eyes, huge red hair.”

Through Wivenhoe, Scruton came to know better the Fleet Street world; he also struck up a friendship with Lady Antonia. “I instinctively took to him,” she says, “because I like people who enjoy life.” His later image as a right-wing controversialist missed something: “I think Roger was more friendly to the world. And kinder. I would say he was a very kind person.”

In London they would go to plays and concerts together — “He always had tremendous knowledge” — or drink wine on the rooftop at Harley Street, where Scruton was renting a flat. Scruton and Casey would stay with the Frasers at their house in Scotland.

So Scruton began to move more confidently in the London world, and especially in that small but lively part of it subsequently referred to as “the New Right”. For a few years in the mid-70s he joined the salon at 3 Kent Terrace next to Regent’s Park, where the conservative American academics Bill and Shirley Letwin hosted tennis parties and dinners.

Then there was the King & Keys, generally regarded as the most squalid pub in Fleet Street, and occupied by Telegraph journalists who, after a hard day’s work producing the most genteel of national newspapers, would commit themselves to the most violent and drunken social life of any newspaper staff.

Yet off to one side in a little semicircle, you might find some of the most accomplished prose stylists of the age, like the Telegraph’s Colin Welch and Michael Wharton; prominent politicians including Keith Joseph and Airey Neave; and, at the centre of the group, the journalist T.E. Utley, one eye covered with a black eyepatch and the other, equally sightless, a milky blue. “There he sat,” Wharton wrote, “imperturbable, booming wisdom, with something legendary and noble about him as he reached with a blind man’s vagueness for his glass of whisky and soda, or waveringly held out his cigarette for a light.”

Not infrequently, from the time he first arrived in London, Scruton would join the Utley corner. The two became firm friends — Scruton even holidayed with the Utleys — and they shared an idea of Toryism: a belief in national culture and national unity, to which free markets and prosperity were subordinate. What Scruton doubted was whether Thatcher understood that too.

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One might have expected Scruton to be an eager Thatcherite. Like her, he was fed up with the post-war consensus, seeing it as managed economic decline; like her, he believed that the country should value the successful and well-off. But he was unawed by her personally — she always preferred speaking to listening at CPG meetings, he noted — and her principles struck him, at that time, as desperately shallow.

In a 1978 article for Casey’s Cambridge Review he complained that Thatcher had articulated no philosophy except an “admiration for Hayek” and a “constant attempt to identify herself with the free choice, free enterprise and free determination of economic man”. This sort of thing was “lame”, Scruton wrote, without a sense of what freedom was for in the first place.

In The Meaning of Conservatism he would elaborate on the point. “Freedom is of no use to a being who lacks the concepts with which to value things, who lives in a solipsistic vacuum, idly willing now this and now that, but with no conception of an objective order that would be affected by his choice.” And the predicament of “modern man” is that he has to find that objective order for himself, that he scarcely knows where to look, and that his “restless longing to be rid of the here and now is stilled by no religious faith”.

There is an element of autobiography here. In the 1970s Scruton was himself a troubled and restless figure. “Angst is one of the most important things one felt with Roger,” says Casey. “All the time.” His relationship with his wife was unravelling — “rising and sinking,” as he would later put it, “on the same unfathomable seas of anxiety”: they would divorce in 1979.

Professionally, he felt academia was too hostile an environment for a conservative; he had considered an escape into the law, reading for the bar and qualifying in 1978, but had no money to pay for the year of pupillage and was reduced to doing part-time work as a conveyancing clerk. “He always seemed to be hard up,” recalls his colleague Dorothy Edgington. In 1980 Scruton was unable to pay his tax bill and had to sell his most precious bottles to Harold Pinter — by then about to marry Antonia Fraser, who had divorced Hugh three years earlier.

Meanwhile, London bohemia had lost whatever glamour it once held: Scruton would go to parties and listen to the progressive opinions of “sequin-spattered artists, pomaded gallery-directors, wide-eyed actresses and literary pseuds” — a “boastful society … in which you had to shine for a while or be snuffed out like a flickering candle”.

In his day job, he came up against the reality of cultural decline. “It was around the year 1975,” he wrote decades later, “that the new intake at universities showed the full effect of a television upbringing.” Whereas the undergraduate body had once been full of “adolescent bookworms and debaters” who could sustain a serious conversation, essays grew noticeably poorly-argued and inarticulate.

Not that he was indifferent to his students. David Papineau, a Cambridge friend who taught at Birkbeck in the 1970s, remembers Scruton as “a very assiduous, responsible teacher. He took a lot of care about the students. If they were struggling, he would go and talk to them after lectures and so on”. Frank Palmer, then an undergraduate, has recalled for Bournbrook magazine Scruton’s “generosity, compassion and kindness”. He “befriended and supported a student who had a sex change operation and was experiencing social difficulty”.

And when Palmer himself was suffering a bout of depression and rang to cancel a tutorial, “he offered to borrow a colleague’s car and drive 15 miles to my home since, as he explained, he once had a spell of depression and knew how debilitating it could be”. Palmer regards Scruton as “a truly great man” and, during Palmer’s later PhD, a model supervisor, not imposing his ideas but helping the student to develop his own.

But amongst his overwhelmingly left-leaning Birkbeck colleagues, he felt alone. “My very first impression,” he would relate, was of “a pronounced hostility”, and he remained “an outcast”. “I didn’t do very well in persuading people that I was an acceptable member of the community.” He always spoke of his two decades at Birkbeck as an unhappy time of social isolation.

And yet his old colleagues don’t remember it like that at all. “You keep reading about how he was persecuted,” says Dorothy Edgington, who was at Birkbeck for the whole of Scruton’s time. But she remembers him as well liked and constantly involved. “He took part in everything. He was very funny, and could make fun of himself as well.”

One department member, something of a left-wing firebrand, bought the top floor of Scruton’s house in Lambeth Road, where Scruton lived on the ground floor and basement. And in general, Edgington says, “the department got on very well with Roger, and thought well of his work.” Was he held back in his career? “Actually, he got promoted very fast for that time”: to reader in 1979, and professor in 1985, in an era when few departments had more than one professor.

Geoffrey Klempner, an undergraduate from 1972-6, has written that Scruton “was highly respected as a teacher, and fondly regarded even by those whose political views were very much more to the left”. Papineau says the staff would tease one another about politics, but in an atmosphere of mutual respect. “I was a naive student radical, and when we would discuss ideas, he wasn’t contemptuous or anything like that. Always polite to everybody. And so was the philosophy department to him.”

Frank Palmer detected that the head of department, David Hamlyn, disliked Scruton; and Palmer had a sense that Scruton “was not completely happy or at home at Birkbeck, though he didn’t openly advertise that fact. But I had no idea how very unhappy he was during those years”.

Did Scruton imagine a hostility that was not there? Or are there just many forms of isolation, including some that can coexist with good cheer and fellowship? Whatever the case, the 1970s were a dark decade in Scruton’s life. But out of the darkness he glimpsed two illuminated paths — one into the future, and one into the past.

The first was that he had the beginnings of a public career: John Gross, the editor of the Times Literary Supplement, had spotted Scruton’s talent and begun commissioning him in 1975. He started to write expansively, on philosophy, literature, architecture and the new intellectual trends, for an audience beyond the academy.

The path into the past was the common law, which Scruton had discovered through reading for the bar. “I was absolutely bowled over by the English law,” he once said; he told Dooley that “all my political thinking grows, in the end, from a love for English law, for the Inns of Court and for what the Inns have represented.” Here, he believed, was the record of how people had lived together peacefully in a common home.

Take private property. The Marxists hoped to abolish it. The free-marketeers reduced it to “property rights”. But on the shelves of Inner Temple library, you would find a thousand years of subtle negotiations amongst the people and their rulers over their respective rights and duties. The common law proved that England could be restored to greatness; and perhaps a talented philosopher could be part of its restoration.

In around 1978 Penguin commissioned Ted Honderich to edit a series of books on political philosophies, and he asked Scruton to write the conservatism volume. All the life and work of the last decade would flow into The Meaning of Conservatism: the philosophy of art and emotion, which clarified Scruton’s understanding of human nature; the Cambridge disdain for the left; the CPG, where he thought through his principles and glimpsed the workings of Westminster; the circle at the King & Keys, who believed that conservatism was worth arguing for.

He was not, at the time, a specialist in political philosophy. Yet a reading notebook from the years 1978–79 reveals both how intensely he worked to remedy that, and how determined he was to think out the subject for himself. Whilst writing The Meaning of Conservatism Scruton records reading more than 20 books a month, mostly political science, legal theory, history and economics, and scribbles down a brief verdict on each; few come away unscathed. Even when he admires aspects of a book he often has serious reservations, as with E.P. Thompson’s The Poverty of Theory (“not bad, naive”) and Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies (“hysterical, good in parts”).

Like Cowling and Casey, the young Scruton was harsher towards liberalism than towards Marxism. Marx’s Wage Labour and Capital, for instance, earns the single-word judgement “OK”. And The Meaning of Conservatism suggests why: at least the Marxists have a theory of alienation, even if it’s wrong. The liberals, Scruton argues, are so preoccupied with “freedom” and “choice” that they cannot make sense of modern man and his anxieties. The tragedy of modern Toryism is that so many Conservatives have adopted “wholesale” the liberal philosophy which is in fact “the principal enemy of conservatism”.

Scruton would describe the book as a ‘defence of Tory values in the face of their betrayal by the free marketeers’

Liberalism sees “the state as means to the end of individual freedom”, and aims for “the satisfaction of as many choices as short time allows”. But where do our choices come from? From the institutions to which we belong: from our family, from “a club, society, class, community, church, regiment or nation”. Conservatism, since it is about defending these forms of institutional life, should be hostile to social disruption. “But, as conservatives have until recently always realised, this argues not for a free market but for something like its opposite.”

Scruton would describe the book as a “defence of Tory values in the face of their betrayal by the free marketeers”. There is, he writes, no plausible alternative to capitalism; but “the free movement of labour, and the concentration of capital” should always be subject to state intervention.

Conservatives ought to worry about welfare payments encouraging dependency; but they should also accept that the welfare state has become “a hereditary right” which only an American would want to abolish. The government should crack down on strikes; but trade unions themselves are part of the order of things, and the real challenge is to make sure you can bribe the leadership with government roles.

As all that suggests, The Meaning of Conservatism is an unsentimental book. It is also decidedly anti-nostalgic. Going misty-eyed about the countryside, architecture and national heritage, he writes, “consigns the subject to inaction … There is no sound politics of antiquarianism”. What he wants to vindicate is the way people live and find meaning in 1980: “The working-man’s club, the businessman’s marina, the institutes and societies of urban and rural life … are in fact the stuff of human society. Through them men and women are able to define themselves, and to discover the language in which to express their common essence … An autonomous institution provides language, custom, tradition, fellowship.”

Some of these forms of membership are unchosen, and in all of them we are to some extent accepting an order we did not come up with. A child doesn’t select its family, but learns to give and receive love within an existing relationship. Again, the nature of marriage is “discovered by the participants as they become involved in it”. By joining the institution one discovers what loyalty actually means: “It would be absurd for a man, faced by his wife’s mortal illness, to say ‘I did not bargain for this’, and so think himself justified in leaving her.”

These are striking words for a man going through a divorce; yet throughout the book Scruton moves beyond his own experience to vindicate a “natural instinct in the unthinking man”: the instinct of cherishing and adopting the values of the institutions in which one finds oneself.

The Meaning of Conservatism has its flaws. The arguments are a little too relentless, the humour a little too sarcastic; it lacks the fluency — not to mention the shimmering, plaintive beauty — of Scruton’s later works. Scruton himself would dismiss it as “impetuous”, “a mess”. His subsequent books on conservatism were intended to replace it.

Moreover, Scruton’s politics changed: when travelling behind the Iron Curtain in the 1980s, he realised that there might be worse political predicaments than people caring too much about individual freedom. And after Tony Blair’s hunting ban, he would confess, “I became a bit more of a liberal,” realising that the “culture of liberty” might be the best protection against leftist authoritarianism. He changed his mind about Thatcher, too, coming to revere her as a champion of the national interest and the rule of law. If she talked about freedom excessively, well, every leader needs a sales pitch.

Nevertheless, The Meaning of Conservatism deserves a special place on every Scrutonian’s bookshelf. It was, he told Dooley, the first book he wrote from the heart. And it epitomises the best of a generation who showed that it was possible to be neither a liberal, nor a Marxist, and yet to think.