The US-based Edmund Burke Society, which tries to provide intellectual heft to the “national conservative” movement that gathered around Donald Trump, regards Scruton as its intellectual godfather. (The society is putting on its first Nat Con Conference in Britain next month, to be addressed by two Cabinet ministers.) Conferences on Scruton’s work are springing up like mushrooms across the continent — there was one in Brussels on April 25 entitled “the defense of civilization.” Budapest boasts a chain of Scruton cafes that hold regular discussions of his work. The flagship of the chain displays various bits of Scrutonia — books, records, an old-fashioned gramophone and even a teapot.

Why has Scruton gone global? The answer to this question tells us a great deal not only about the career (and after-career) of a remarkable Englishman but also about the state of the global conservative movement.

Scruton was a heroic anti-Communist who made frequent trips behind the Iron Curtain to proselytize against the ruling ideology, on one occasion being arrested, interrogated, and deported. Fluent in Czech, he taught courses on the giants of European philosophy to people who were starved of anything but the gruel of party propaganda; he lectured on high European art, architecture and music to people condemned to live in Soviet-style council flats. He smuggled in photocopiers and fax machines so that samizdat versions of texts could be published. According to numerous accounts, he took enormous pains as a mentor, even arranging for students to take Cambridge University exams from their home countries, the first time that had ever happened.