The View from Scrutopia: Barry Millington assesses an ambitious new study of the ‘Ring’

Review of Roger Scruton, The Ring of Truth: The Wisdom of Wagner’s ‘Ring of the Nibelung’ (Allen Lane, 2016).

November 2016, Volume 10, Number 3, 81–5.

For the benefit of those who have not encountered him before, Sir Roger Scruton – he was knighted earlier this year – is a British philosopher, aesthetician and composer of some renown, not say notoriety, for his arch-conservative views. His Damascene moment occurred, of all places and at all times, in the Latin Quarter of Paris in 1968, the epicentre of student revolt. The young Scruton, however, saw through the ‘marxisant’ (a favourite term) positions maintained by his coevals on the barricades and became a conservative, an allegiance to which he has remained faithful to the point of caricature. In various publications since that time he has excoriated modernism, postmodernism, the peace movement, multi-culturalism, foreign aid, feminism and homosexuality (described as a ‘perversion’ – a view he has subsequently retracted), while loudly proclaiming the joys of fox-hunting and smoking.