Culture > Western Civilization

Reclaiming The Human Home

Roger Scruton’s defense of beauty and home against the modernist assault.

Lars Møller | May 15, 2026

From Wikimedia Commons: Carlisle Market Place in front of the Old Town Hall (Herbert Lees, between 1870 and 1880) 

Since the slaughter of WWI, Europeans and Americans have waged a relentless campaign against their own civilization. A self-loathing spirit has seeped into every corner of culture, repudiating the Judeo-Christian roots that once gave the West its distinctive shape: the dignity of the person, the sanctity of place, the longing for transcendence. This erasure has been particularly brutal in architecture.

Modernism, the aesthetic arm of a revolutionary and totalitarian impulse, originally set out to annihilate five thousand years of building tradition. It replaced the classical idiom—streets that invited conversation, façades that whispered continuity, roofs that sheltered memory—with glass-and-steel machines that scream contempt for the very idea of home. However, revolutionary avant-gardists—self-proclaimed “liberators”—were impatient to create a new humanity without special ties and break down the familiar and beloved. Removing the monuments of the past in our cities became for them a matter of sociocultural cleansing—and an ideological imperative.

Into this wasteland stepped Sir Roger Scruton (1944–2020), the philosopher who taught us that beauty is not a luxury but a necessity of the soul. In works such as The Aesthetics of Architecture (1979) and Beauty (2009), and later as chairman of the UK government’s Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission, he insisted that the built environment is never neutral. It either nurtures oikophilia—the love of home—or breeds alienation. Architecture, for Scruton, is the art of settlement. It must be scaled to the human body, rooted in a particular place, and generous enough to welcome generations yet unborn. When it fails these duties, it does not merely look ugly; it wounds the psyche, severs the thread of collective memory, and turns citizens into transients in their own cities.

At the heart of Scruton’s philosophy lies the conviction that beauty and human scale are inseparable. A building should not dominate or intimidate; it should invite. Streets must be “shared spaces” where people linger,........

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