Thoughts from a Life: Scruton in Eastern Europe

By Ryszard Legutko

Roger Scruton started his more or less regular visits to Poland in the 1980s, after the martial law against the Solidarity movement was lifted. For some reason, the communists tolerated such visits, even if among the visitors were people of long anti-communist standing. I remember a conference in Poland, organized by Roger and his colleagues, where one of the participants was Melvyn Lasky, the then editor in chief of the Encounter magazine, a staunchly anti-communist and anti-Soviet publication. The visits to Czechoslovakia were more difficult, as the Czechoslovak communists did not hesitate to detain, interrogate, and even arrest foreign intellectuals suspected of political troublemaking. Roger experienced this, too.

Roger belonged to a network of scholars who were helping the political opposition in Eastern Europe. Their activity began in Czechoslovakia with the Jan Hus Foundation in 1980, supported by a broad spectrum of scholars from Jacques Derrida and Juergen Habermas to Roger Scruton and David Regan. Then came Poland, Hungary and later Romania. In Poland, Roger co-founded the Jagiellonian Trust, a small but significant organization. The other founders and active participants were Baroness Caroline Cox, Jessica Douglas-Home, Kathy Wilkes, Agnieszka Kołakowska, Dennis O’Keeffe, Timothy Garton Ash, and others.

Roger was then already a renowned scholar and a public intellectual. We were honoured to have him as our ally, but we were somewhat puzzled by his commitment to Eastern Europe's political opposition. What made a respectable British scholar and a public intellectual come here and risk unpleasant consequences? Presumably, there were many reasons, not one. We knew he had a particular sympathy for Prague and the Czech society, which bore fruit in the novel, Notes from Underground, he wrote many years later. But his involvement in East European affairs was more than an emotional attachment.

He believed that Eastern Europe – despite the communist terror and aggressive social engineering – managed to preserve a sense of historical continuity and strong ties to European and national traditions, more unconscious than openly articulated, which made it even more valuable. For this reason, decades later, he warned us against joining the European Union, arguing that whatever was left of those ties will be demolished by the political and ideological bulldozer of European bureaucracy.

For the East Europeans, Roger’s visits were not only an intellectual pleasure, whether he was lecturing or meeting us over coffee or dinner but also a source of inspiration. At that time, the intellectual opposition to communism in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and elsewhere was looking for a philosophical alternative to Marxism and Marxism-related theories that legitimized communism. The most attractive and most popular option was liberalism, to which many members of the opposition turned in hope. Liberalism offered prosperity and civilizational progress through free economy and freedom through social contract and human rights doctrines.

Those of us who were fortunate enough to know Scruton slowly modified our position under his influence. His conservatism, which took inspiration from many philosophical sources, sometimes rather unexpected such as Hegel’s philosophy, convinced many of us that the conditions of freedom are more accurately captured in non-liberal rather than liberal philosophy. The next decades in the history of Eastern Europe proved him right.

Ryszard Legutko is a Polish philosopher and politician, and Professor of Philosophy at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Legutko currently serves as the head of the Polish Law and Justice Delegation to the European Parliament and Co-chairman of the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR).