Michael Joseph Oakeshott FBA (; 11 December
1901 – 19 December 1990) was an English
philosopher and political theorist who wrote
about philosophy of history, philosophy of
religion, aesthetics, philosophy of education,
and philosophy of law.
== Biography ==
=== Early life ===
Oakeshott was the son of Frances Maude (Hellicar)
and Joseph Francis Oakeshott, a civil servant
and a member of the Fabian Society. George
Bernard Shaw was a friend. Michael Oakeshott
attended St George's School, Harpenden, from
1912 to 1920. He enjoyed his schooldays, and
the Headmaster, Cecil Grant, later became
a friend.In 1920 Oakeshott became an undergraduate
at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge,
where he read history. He obtained an MA and
subsequently became a Fellow. While he was
at Cambridge he admired the British idealist
philosophers J. M. E. McTaggart and John Grote,
and the medieval historian Zachary Nugent
Brooke. The historian Herbert Butterfield
was a contemporary and fellow member of the
Junior Historians society.
=== 1930s ===
Oakeshott was dismayed by the political extremism
that occurred in Europe during the 1930s,
and his surviving lectures from this period
reveal a dislike of National Socialism and
Marxism.
=== Second World War ===
Although Oakeshott, in his essay "The Claim
of Politics" (1939), defended the right of
individuals not to become directly involved,
in 1941 he joined the British Army. He reportedly
wished to join the Special Operations Executive
(SOE), but the military decided that his appearance
was "too unmistakably English" for him to
conduct covert operations on the Continent.
He was on active service in Europe with the
intelligence unit Phantom, which had connections
with the Special Air Service (SAS), but he
was never in the front line.
=== Postwar ===
In 1945 Oakeshott was demobilized and returned
to Cambridge. In 1947 he left Cambridge for
Nuffield College, Oxford, but after only a
year there he secured an appointment as Professor
of Political Science at the London School
of Economics (LSE), succeeding the leftist
Harold Laski. He was deeply unsympathetic
to the student activism at LSE during the
late 1960s, on the grounds that it disrupted
the work of the university. Oakeshott retired
from the LSE in 1969.
In his retirement he retreated to live quietly
in a country cottage in Langton Matravers
in Dorset. He lived long enough to experience
increasing recognition, although he has become
much more widely written about since his death.
Oakeshott refused an offer of being made a
Companion of Honour, for which he was proposed
by Margaret Thatcher.
== Philosophy ==
=== Early works ===
Oakeshott's early work, some of which has
been published posthumously as What is History?
And Other Essays (2004) and The Concept of
a Philosophical Jurisprudence (2007), shows
that he was more interested in the philosophical
problems that derived from his historical
studies than he was in the history, even though
he was employed as a historian.
=== Philosophy and modes of experience ===
Oakeshott published his first book, Experience
and its Modes, in 1933. He noted that the
book owed much to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Hegel and F. H. Bradley; commentators also
noticed resemblances between this work and
the ideas of thinkers such as R. G. Collingwood
and Georg Simmel.The book argued that our
experience is usually modal, in the sense
that we always have a governing perspective
on the world, be it practical or theoretical.
There are various theoretical approaches one
may take to understanding the world: natural
science and history for example are separate
modes of experience. It was a mistake, he
declared, to treat history as if it ought
to be practised on the model of the natural
sciences.
Philosophy, however, is not a modal interest.
At this stage of his career, he saw philosophy
as the world seen sub specie aeternitatis,
literally, 'under the aspect of eternity',
free from presuppositions, whereas science
and history and the practical mode relied
on certain assumptions. Later (there is some
disagreement about exactly when), Oakeshott
adopted a pluralistic view of the various
modes of experience, with philosophy just
one 'voice' amongst others, though it retained
its self-scrutinizing character.
The dominating principles of scientific and
historical thought were quantity (the world
sub specie quantitatis) and being in the past
(the world sub specie praeteritorum), respectively.
Oakeshott distinguished the academic perspective
on the past from the practical, in which the
past is seen in terms of its relevance to
our present and future. His insistence on
the autonomy of history places him close to
Collingwood, who also argued for the autonomy
of historical knowledge.
The practical world view (the world sub specie
voluntatis) presupposed the ideas of will
and of value in terms of which practical action
in the arenas of politics, economics, and
ethics made sense. Because all action is conditioned
by presuppositions, Oakeshott was inclined
to see any attempt to change the world as
reliant upon a scale of values, which themselves
presuppose a context of experience. Even the
conservative disposition to maintain the status
quo relies upon managing inevitable change,
he would later elaborate in his essay 'On
Being Conservative'.
=== Post-war essays ===
During this period Oakeshott published what
became his best known work during his lifetime,
the collection entitled Rationalism in Politics
and Other Essays (1962). Some of the polemics
against the direction post-World War II Britain
was taking, in particular the acceptance of
socialism, gained Oakeshott a reputation as
a conservative, seeking to uphold the importance
of tradition, and sceptical about rationalism
and fixed ideologies. Bernard Crick described
him as a 'lonely nihilist'.Oakeshott's opposition
to what he considered Utopian political projects
is summed by his use of the analogy (possibly
borrowed from the Marquess of Halifax, a 17th-century
English author whom he admired) of a ship
of state which has "neither starting-place
nor appointed destination...[and where] the
enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel".
He was a critic of the Cambridge historian
E. H. Carr, historian of Soviet Russia, claiming
that Carr had an uncritical attitude towards
the Bolshevik regime, taking some of its propaganda
at face value.
=== On Human Conduct and Oakeshott's political
theory ===
In his essay "On Being Conservative" (1956)
Oakeshott explained what he regarded as the
conservative disposition: "To be conservative
... is to prefer the familiar to the unknown,
to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to
mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited
to the unbounded, the near to the distant,
the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient
to the perfect, present laughter to utopian
bliss."
Oakeshott's political philosophy, as advanced
in On Human Conduct (1975), is free of any
form of party politics. The book's first part
("On the Theoretical Understanding of Human
Conduct") develops a theory of human action
as the exercise of intelligent agency in activities
such as wanting and choosing, the second ("On
the Civil Condition") discusses the formal
conditions of association appropriate to such
intelligent agents, described as "civil" or
legal association, and the third ("On the
Character of a Modern European State") examines
how far this understanding of human association
has affected politics and political ideas
in post-Renaissance European history.
Oakeshott suggests that there had been two
major modes or understandings of human social
organization. In the first, which he calls
"enterprise association" (or universitas),
the state is understood as imposing some universal
purpose (profit, salvation, progress, racial
domination) on its subjects. By contrast,
"civil association" (or societas) is primarily
a legal relationship in which laws impose
obligatory conditions of action but do not
require choosing one action rather than another.
The complex, often technical style of On Human
Conduct found few readers, and its initial
reception was mostly one of bafflement. Oakeshott,
who rarely responded to critics, used an article
in the journal Political Theory to reply sardonically
to some of the contributions made at a symposium
on the book.In his posthumously-published
The Politics of Faith and the Politics of
Scepticism, Oakeshott describes enterprise
and civil association in different terms.
Here, an enterprise association is seen as
based in a fundamental faith in human ability
to ascertain and grasp some universal "good"
(i.e. the Politics of Faith), and civil association
is seen as based in a fundamental scepticism
about human ability to either ascertain or
achieve this good (i.e. the Politics of Scepticism).
Oakeshott considers power (especially technological
power) as a necessary prerequisite for the
Politics of Faith, because a) it allows people
to believe they can achieve something great
(e.g. something universally good), and b)
it allows them to implement the policies necessary
to achieve their goal. The Politics of Scepticism,
on the other hand, rests on the idea that
government should concern itself with preventing
bad things from happening rather than enabling
ambiguously good events.
Oakeshott employs the analogy of the adverb
to describe the kind of restraint law involves.
To him, laws prescribe "adverbial conditions":
they condition our actions, but do not determine
the substantive ends of our choices. For example,
the law against murder is not a law against
killing as such, but only a law against killing
"murderously". Or, to choose a more trivial
example, the law does not dictate that I have
a car, but if I do, I must drive it on the
same side of the road as everybody else. This
contrasts with the rules of enterprise association
in which those actions required by the governing
are made compulsory for all.
=== Philosophy of history ===
The final work Oakeshott published in his
own lifetime, On History (1983) returned to
the idea that history is a distinct mode of
experience, but built on the theory of action
developed for On Human Conduct. Much of On
History had in fact been written at the same
time, in the early 1970s.
During the mid-1960s, Oakeshott declared an
admiration for Wilhelm Dilthey, one of the
pioneers of hermeneutics. On History can be
interpreted as an essentially neo-Kantian
enterprise of working out the conditions of
the possibility of historical knowledge, work
that Dilthey had begun.
The first three essays set out the distinction
between the present of historical experience
and the present of practical experience, as
well as the concepts of historical situation,
historical event, and what is meant by change
in history. On History includes an essay on
jurisprudence ('The Rule of Law'). It also
included a retelling of The Tower of Babel
in a modern setting in which Oakeshott expresses
disdain for human willingness to sacrifice
individuality, culture, and quality of life
for grand collective projects. He attributes
this behaviour to fascination with novelty,
persistent dissatisfaction, greed, and lack
of self-reflection.
=== Other works ===
Oakeshott's other works included a reader
on The Social and Political Doctrines of Contemporary
Europe consisting of selected texts illustrating
the main doctrines of liberalism, national
socialism, fascism, communism, and Roman Catholicism
(1939). He was editor of an edition of Thomas
Hobbes's Leviathan (1946), for which he provided
an introduction recognized as a significant
contribution to the literature by later scholars
such as Quentin Skinner. Several of his essays
on Hobbes were published during 1975 as Hobbes
on Civil Association. He wrote, with his Cambridge
colleague Guy Griffith, A Guide to the Classics,
or How to Pick The Derby Winner (1936), a
guide to the principles of successful betting
on horse-racing; this was his only non-academic
work. He was the author of well over 150 essays
and reviews, most of which have yet to be
republished.
Just before he died, Oakeshott approved two
edited collections of his works, The Voice
of Liberal Learning (1989), a collection of
his essays on education, and a second, revised
and expanded edition of Rationalism in Politics
itself (1991). Posthumous collections of his
writings include Morality and Politics in
Modern Europe (1993), a lecture series he
gave at Harvard in 1958, Religion, Politics,
and the Moral Life (1993), essays mostly from
his early and middle periods, The Politics
of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism (1996),
a manuscript from the 1950s contemporary with
much of the material in Rationalism in Politics
but written in a more considered tone.
The bulk of his papers are now in the Oakeshott
archive at the London School of Economics.
Further volumes of posthumous writings are
in preparation, as is a biography, and during
the first decade of the 21st century a series
of monographs devoted to his work were published.
== Bibliography ==
1933. Experience and Its Modes. Cambridge
University Press
1936. A Guide to the Classics, or, How to
Pick the Derby. With G.T. Griffith. London:
Faber and Faber
1939. The Social and Political Doctrines of
Contemporary Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press
1941. The Social and Political Doctrines of
Contemporary Europe, 2nd edition. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press
1942. The Social and Political Doctrines of
Contemporary Europe with five additional prefaces
by F.A. Ogg. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press
1947. A New Guide to the Derby: How to Pick
the Winner. With G.T. Griffith. London: Faber
and Faber
1955. La Idea de Gobierno en la Europa Moderna.
Madrid: Ateneo
1962. Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays.
London: Methuen (Expanded edition – 1991,
by Liberty Fund)
1966. Rationalismus in der Politik. (trans.
K. Streifthau) Neuwied und Berlin: Luchterhard
1975. On Human Conduct. Oxford: Oxford University
Press
1975. Hobbes on Civil Association. Oxford:
Basil Blackwell
1983. On History and Other Essays. Basil Blackwell
1985. La Condotta Umana. Bologna: Società
Editrice il Mulino
1989. The Voice of Liberal Learning. New Haven
and London: Yale University Press
=== Posthumous ===
1991. Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays.
Indianapolis: Liberty Press
1993. Morality and Politics in Modern Europe.
New Haven: Yale University Press
1993. Religion, Politics, and the Moral Life.
New Haven: Yale University Press
1996. The Politics of Faith and the Politics
of Skepticism. New Haven: Yale University
Press
2000. Zuversicht und Skepsis: Zwei Prinzipien
neuzeitlicher Politik. (trans. C. Goldmann).
Berlin: Fest
2004. What Is History? And Other Essays. Thorverton:
Imprint Academic
2006. Lectures in the History of Political
Thought. Thorverton: Imprint Academic
2007. The Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence:
Essays and Reviews 1926–51. Thorverton:
Imprint Academic
2008. The Vocabulary of a Modern European
State: Essays and Reviews 1952–88. Thorverton:
Imprint Academic
2010. Early Political Writings 1925–30.
Thorverton: Imprint Academic
== References ==
== Further reading ==
Robert Grant, Oakeshott (The Claridge Press,
1990)
Terry Nardin, The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott
(Penn State, 2001, ISBN 0-271-02156-X)
Efraim Podoksik, In Defence of Modernity:
Vision and Philosophy in Michael Oakeshott
(Imprint Academic, 2003, ISBN 0-907845-66-5)
Paul Franco, Michael Oakeshott: An Introduction
(Yale, 2004, ISBN 0-300-10404-9)
Corey Abel & Timothy Fuller, eds. The Intellectual
Legacy of Michael Oakeshott (Imprint Academic,
2005, ISBN 1-84540-009-7)
Elizabeth Campbell Corey, Michael Oakeshott
on Religion, Aesthetics, and Politics (University
of Missouri Press, 2006, ISBN 978-0826216403)
Till Kinzel, Michael Oakeshott. Philosoph
der Politik (Perspektiven, 9) (Antaios, 2007,
ISBN 978-3935063098)
Andrew Sullivan, Intimations Pursued: The
Voice of Practice in the Conversation of Michael
Oakeshott (Imprint Academic, 2007)
Corey Abel, ed, The meanings of Michael Oakeshott's
Conservatism (Imprint Academic, 2010, ISBN
978-1845402181)
Efraim Podoksik, ed, The Cambridge Companion
to Oakeshott (Cambridge University Press,
2012) ISBN 978-0521764674. OCLC 770694299
Paul Franco & Leslie Marsh, eds, A Companion
to Michael Oakeshott (Penn State University
Press, 2012) ISBN 978-0271054070. OCLC 793497138
Gene Callahan (2012). Oakeshott on Rome and
America. Charlottesville, VA: Exeter: Imprint
Academic. p. 227. ISBN 978-1845403133. OCLC
800863300.
== External links ==
Michael Oakeshott Association
The Michael Oakeshott Bibliography
Michael Oakeshott, "Rationalism in Politics".
Cambridge Journal, Volume I, 1947 (broken
link – go through your State or Provincial
library's subscription service)
Catalogue of the Oakeshott papers at the Archives
Division of the London School of Economics.
Appearances on C-SPAN
