Michael Oakeshott

Michael Oakeshott has long been recognized as one of the most important political philosophers of the twentieth century, but until now no single volume has been able to examine all the facets of his wide-ranging philosophy with sufficient depth, expertise, and authority. The essays collected here cover all aspects of Oakeshott’s thought, from his theory of knowledge and philosophies of history, religion, art, and education to his reflections on morality, politics, and law. Aside from the editors, the contributors are Corey Abel, David Boucher, Elizabeth Corey, Robert Devigne, Timothy Fuller, Steven Gerencser, Robert Grant, Noel Malcolm, Kenneth McIntyre, Kenneth Minogue, Noël O’Sullivan, Geoffrey Thomas, and Martyn Thompson.

A fresh reading of Oakeshott’s contributions to the ongoing conversation of modern political thought. One of the seminal voices of twentieth-century political thought, Michael Oakeshott’s work has often fallen prey to the ideological labels applied to it by his interpreters and commentators. In this book, Luke Philip Plotica argues that we stand to learn more by embracing Oakeshott’s own understanding of his work as contributions to an ever-evolving conversation of humanity. Building from Oakeshott’s concept of conversation as an engagement among a plurality of voices “without symposiarch or arbiter” to dictate its course, Plotica explores several fundamental and recurring themes of Oakeshott’s philosophical and political writings: individual agency, tradition, the state, and democracy. When viewed as interventions into an ongoing conversation of modern political thought, Oakeshott’s work transcends the limits of familiar ideological labels, and his thought opens into deeper engagement with some of the most significant thinkers of the twentieth century, including Ludwig Wittgenstein, Charles Taylor, Michel Foucault, and Hannah Arendt. Attending to these often unexpected or unrecognized affinities casts fresh light on some of Oakeshott’s most familiar ideas and their systematic relations, and facilitates a better understanding of the breadth and depth of his political thought. Luke Philip Plotica is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Virginia Tech.

This collection of recent scholarship on the thought of Michael Oakeshott includes essays by both distinguished and established authors as well as a fresh crop of younger talent. Together, they address the meanings of Oakeshott's conservatism through the lenses of his ideas on religion, history, and tradition, and explore his relationships to philosophers ranging from Hume to Ryle, Cavell, and others. The collection assigns no single or final meaning to Oakeshott's conservatism, but finds in him a number of possibilities for thinking fruitfully about what conservatism might mean, when it is no longer considered as a doctrine, but as a habit or a turn of mind.

This is the first comprehensive study of Michael Oakeshott as a philosopher rather than a political theorist, which is how most commentators have regarded him. Indeed, the careful reading of his published and unpublished writings that Terry Nardin provides here shows that Oakeshott's concerns have been primarily philosophical, not political. These writings go far beyond politics to offer a critical philosophy of human activity and of the disciplines that interpret and explain it. Oakeshott argues that inquiry can be independent of practical concerns, even when its subject is the thought and action of human beings. Although the book considers Oakeshott's views on morality, law, and government, it is primarily concerned with his ideas about the character of knowledge, especially knowledge of intelligent human conduct, and focuses attention on the concepts of modality, contingency, and civility that are central to Oakeshott's philosophy as a whole. Nardin seeks to show how Oakeshott's critique of scientism and other forms of foundationalism supports a powerful version of the argument that history is the proper mode for understanding human choice and action. The book thus provides the fullest discussion available of Oakeshott's antifoundationalist view of epistemology, metaphysics, and the philosophy of history and the human sciences. It examines his arguments concerning the criteria of truth, the forms of knowledge, the relationship between theory and practice, the place of interpretation in the social sciences, the nature and importance of historical explanation, and the definition of philosophy itself. And it is the first study to look at Oakeshott's relationship to phenomenology, hermeneutics, and other movements in twentieth-century Continental philosophy.

This book is Michael Oakeshott's discussion of the relationships between the most important perspectives from which we experience the world.

Michael Oakeshott was a leading Political theorist described by The Telegraph in 1990 as "the greatest political philosopher in the Anglo-Saxon tradition since Mill – or even Burke". There has been sustained interest in his work, and a developing body of literature, over recent years. This book offers a clearly written and accessible critical analysis: it presents complex theories and concepts in a way that will introduce new readers to Oakeshott’s work, and at the same time offers a fresh approach for those already familiar with his philosophy. The Politics and Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott reveals how his work relates to contemporary political philosophy (for example, Arendt, Rorty, Rawls); and moreover, how it links to broader debates within philosophy and the social sciences and, building upon the work of Devigne, through to postmodernism. This book brings together the disparate influences that have, at various times, been associated with Oakeshott’s work, and draws from a number of essays which have been published posthumously. Referring to these, and other more well-known texts, the author makes sense of the many dimensions of Oakeshott’s work by placing a moral concern as central to his system of thought. All in all this book considers the recently published ‘lesser-known’ essays as well as the latest secondary appraisals of Oakeshott’s work, which sets his thought in the contemporary political environment of the twenty-first century. This much-needed text with be of great interest to students and researchers in political science and philosophy.

Michael Oakeshott, the foremost British political philosopher of the twentieth century, died in 1990, leaving a substantial collection of unpublished material. Yale University Press is continuing to make available the best of these illuminating works. In this polished and hitherto unknown work, Oakeshott argues that modern politics was constituted out of a debate, persistent through centuries of European political experience down to our own day, over the question "What should governments do?" According to Oakeshott, two different answers have dominated our thought since the fifteenth century. One, exemplified by such thinkers as Rousseau and Marx, expresses a belief in the capacity of human beings to control, design, and monitor all aspects of social and political life, a belief fostered by the intoxicating increase in power available to governments in modern times. On the other hand, sceptics such as Montaigne, Pascal, and Hobbes argued that governments cannot, in principle, produce perfection and that we should prevent concentrations of power that may result in tyrannies that oppress the dignity of the human spirit. Oakeshott exposes the pitfalls of both positions and shows the value of a middle ground that incorporates scepticism with enough faith to avoid total quietism. Readers of Oakeshott will find here the thinking that lies behind his famous definition of politics as "the pursuit of intimations.".