British conservative philosopher also was professor, prolific author

LONDON — Roger Scruton, one of Britain’s most prominent conservative philosophers, has died. He was 75.

Mr. Scruton’s family said in a statement that he died Sunday after a six-month battle with cancer.

A graduate of Cambridge University, Mr. Scruton embraced conservative ideas after visiting Paris amid the May 1968 student uprising. He recalled later that the students on the barricades struck him as “self-indulgent middle-class hooligans.”

A lecturer for many years at the University of London’s Birkbeck College, Mr. Scruton carved out a role as a public intellectual — a relatively rare thing in Britain — with more than 50 books on morality, politics, culture and aesthetics, including “The Meaning of Conservatism,” “The Aesthetics of Architecture” and “England: An Elegy.”

Mr. Scruton valued tradition, high culture and the British countryside; he disliked socialism, liberalism, most modern architecture and much of popular culture.

In Britain, Mr. Scruton wrote articles for many publications and appeared on radio and television. He was eloquent and forthright in expressing often contentious views. Over the years, he said homosexuality wasn’t “normal,” opposed gay marriage, supported capital punishment and wondered whether date rape should be considered a crime.

In 1999, the Pet Shop Boys won a libel suit against him after he alleged in a book on pop culture that their songs were mostly the work of sound engineers, and in 2002 he proposed to a tobacco company that he could place pro-smoking articles in the media in exchange for a fee.

Mr. Scruton was hired by Britain’s Conservative government in 2018 as an adviser on improving modern architecture. He was fired after the left-of-center New Statesman magazine published an interview in which Mr. Scruton said Chinese authorities were “creating robots of their own people,” disparaged billionaire philanthropist George Soros and called Islamophobia “a word invented to stop discussion of a major issue.”

The magazine later apologized for the way it had promoted the interview on social media, acknowledging that “the views of Professor Scruton were not accurately represented in the tweets.”

Mr. Scruton was reappointed to the government post. He said the incident showed there was a “witch hunt” against those on the political right.

AP FILE PHOTO Roger Scruton shows his award after being knighted for services to philosophy, teaching and public education in 2016 in London. He was one of Britain’s most prominent conservative thinkers.