Michael Oakeshott And The Conversation Of Modern Political Thought

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.

In this book Andrew Sullivan examines Oakeshott's transition from his original emphasis on philosophy as providing what was ultimately satisfactory in experience to his later emphasis on practical life. This satisfaction is best achieved by a fusion of the modes of poetry and practice, leading the author to examine Oakeshott's view of religious life as the consummation of practice in its most poetic incarnation. The book also examines how the conception of practice is applied in Oakeshott's political writings, focusing on the notion of civil association.

his book offers a description, explanation, and evaluation of Michael Oakeshott’s democratic theory. He was not a democratic theorist as such, but as a twentieth-century English political theorist for whom liberal theory held deep importance, his thought often engaged democratic theory implicitly, and many times did so explicitly. The author’s project penetrates two renewals. The first is the revitalization of interest in Oakeshott, and the second is the renewal of democratic theory which began in the 1980s. In respect to this latter renewal, the book engages the deliberative turn in democratic theory. These revivals create the context for this new look at Oakeshott. To state the matter as a problem, one might say that in light of new and fecund democratic theory, it is a problem for political theory if one of the most important political theorists of the twentieth century is left out of the discourse insofar as he has something relevant to say about deliberative democracy. It is of no small importance that almost all the work in democratic theory being done these days is of the deliberative/discursive kind, or responses to it. That is, deliberative theory is driving the agenda of democratic theory. The author argues that Oakeshott does indeed have something relevant to say which is applicable to this democratic theory.

This book presents a comprehensive study of Oakeshott's conception of political activity. The author first examines Oakeshott in the contexts of liberal, conservative and Idealist thought, and then presents a detailed interpretation of the change in his conception of politics in the context of British postwar political thought. It is argued that Oakeshott's conception of political activity shifted from a near contempt of politics towards the applauding of politics as a deliberative and reflective activity. The development is disclosed by examining the change in his key concepts, such as authority and tradition. Accordingly, some rather unexpected aspects of Oakeshott's thought, such as his close relationship to the linguistic turn, appear. The author argues that although Oakeshott cannot exactly be classified as belonging to that group of political philosophers for whom politics represents a superior human activity, his later work presents an important and original view of politics as an art of contingency.

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.

Oakeshott's memorable lectures on the history of political thought, delivered each year at the London School of Economics, will now be available in print for the first time as Volume II of his Selected Writings. Based on manuscripts in the LSE archive for 1966–67, the last year of Oakeshott's tenure as Professor of Political Science, these thirty lectures deal with Greek, Roman, mediaeval, and modern European political thought in a uniquely accessible manner. Scholars familiar with Oakeshott’s work will recognize his own ideas subtly blended with an exposition carefully crafted for an undergraduate audience; those discovering Oakeshott for the first time will find an account of the subject that remains illuminating and provocative.

This book addresses a question fundamental for Oakeshott throughout his life, which is what we are doing when we read and discuss some memorable work in the history of political thought. The approach the book takes to Oakeshott’s response to this question is of particular interest in that it explores in detail extensive notes he made on the beginnings of political philosophy in ancient Greece in an unpublished set of notebooks in which he recorded his thoughts on many different subjects throughout his life. In addition, the book gives contemporary significance to Oakeshott’s interpretation of the history of political thought by using it to confront a series of contemporary challenges to the study of the history of political thought and to the study of the ‘great books.’ In particular, Oakeshott’s distinction between ‘various kinds or levels of political thought’ is carefully analyzed, as is also the extent of his agreement and disagreement with Quentin Skinner. In the concluding chapter, the author relates Oakeshott’s view of the nature of the history of political thought to his well-known description of philosophy as ‘conversation’, describing it as an introduction to that conversation.

Although Oakeshott's philosophy has received considerable attention, the vision which underlies it has been almost completely ignored. This vision, which is rooted in the intellectual debates of his epoch, cements his ideas into a coherent whole and provides a compelling defence of modernity. The main feature of Oakeshott's vision of modernity is seen here as radical plurality resulting from 'fragmentation' of experience and society. On the level of experience, modernity denies the existence of the hierarchical medieval scheme and argues that there exist independent ways of understanding our world, such as science and history, which cannot be reduced to each other. On the level of society, modernity finds expression in liberal doctrine, according to which society is an aggregate of individuals each pursuing his or her own choices. For Oakeshott, to be modern means not only to recognise this condition of radical plurality but also to learn to appreciate and enjoy it. Oakeshott did not think that it was possible to find a comprehensive philosophical justification for modernity, therefore the only way to preserve modern civilisation seemed to be an appeal to sentiment. As a consequence he was a passionate defender of liberal education as the best way to underwrite the 'conversation of mankind.'