Michael Oakeshott
Encyclopedia
Michael Joseph Oakeshott (December 11, 1901 – December 19, 1990) was an English philosopher and political theorist who wrote about philosophy of history
Philosophy of history
The term philosophy of history refers to the theoretical aspect of history, in two senses. It is customary to distinguish critical philosophy of history from speculative philosophy of history...

, philosophy of religion
Philosophy of religion
Philosophy of religion is a branch of philosophy concerned with questions regarding religion, including the nature and existence of God, the examination of religious experience, analysis of religious language and texts, and the relationship of religion and science...

, aesthetics
Aesthetics
Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste...

, and philosophy of law. He is widely regarded as one of the most important conservative
Conservatism
Conservatism is a political and social philosophy that promotes the maintenance of traditional institutions and supports, at the most, minimal and gradual change in society. Some conservatives seek to preserve things as they are, emphasizing stability and continuity, while others oppose modernism...

 thinkers of the 20th century, although he has sometimes been characterized as a liberal
Liberalism
Liberalism is the belief in the importance of liberty and equal rights. Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but generally, liberals support ideas such as constitutionalism, liberal democracy, free and fair elections, human rights,...

 thinker.

Early life

His father, Joseph Oakeshott, was a civil servant and a leading member of the Fabian Society
Fabian Society
The Fabian Society is a British socialist movement, whose purpose is to advance the principles of democratic socialism via gradualist and reformist, rather than revolutionary, means. It is best known for its initial ground-breaking work beginning late in the 19th century and continuing up to World...

. George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60...

 was a friend. Michael Oakeshott attended St. George's School, Harpenden
St. George's School, Harpenden
St George's VA School, Harpenden is a traditional day and boarding school in Harpenden, Hertfordshire, United Kingdom, serving students of both genders from ages 11 to 18 with emphasis on a Christian ethos...

 from 1912 to 1920. He enjoyed his schooldays, and the Headmaster Cecil Grant later became a friend.

In 1920 he went to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge
Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge
Gonville and Caius College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England. The college is often referred to simply as "Caius" , after its second founder, John Keys, who fashionably latinised the spelling of his name after studying in Italy.- Outline :Gonville and...

 to read history, obtaining his MA, and subsequently became a Fellow. While at Cambridge, he admired the British Idealist philosopher, J. M. E. McTaggart
J. M. E. McTaggart
John McTaggart was an idealist metaphysician. For most of his life McTaggart was a fellow and lecturer in philosophy at Trinity College, Cambridge. He was an exponent of the philosophy of Hegel and among the most notable of the British idealists.-Personal life:J. M. E. McTaggart was born in 1866...

, and the medieval historian Zachary Nugent Brooke
Zachary Nugent Brooke
Zachary Nugent Brooke FBA was a British medieval historian and author.-Life:Brooke was educated at Bradfield College in Berkshire and St John's College, Cambridge. In 1908, he was elected to a Drosier Fellowship at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge. He was appointed Professor of...

. The historian Herbert Butterfield
Herbert Butterfield
Sir Herbert Butterfield was a British historian and philosopher of history who is remembered chiefly for two books—a short volume early in his career entitled The Whig Interpretation of History and his Origins of Modern Science...

 was a contemporary and fellow member of the Junior Historians society.

1930s

Oakeshott was dismayed by the descent into political extremism that took place in Europe in the 1930s, and his surviving lectures from this period reveal a dislike of National Socialism
Nazism
Nazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...

 and Marxism
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...

.

The Second World War

Although his 1939 essay 'The Claim of Politics' defended the right of individuals not to become directly involved, in 1941, Oakeshott joined the British Army
British Army
The British Army is the land warfare branch of Her Majesty's Armed Forces in the United Kingdom. It came into being with the unification of the Kingdom of England and Scotland into the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707. The new British Army incorporated Regiments that had already existed in England...

 in its fight against Nazi Germany. He was on active service in Europe with the intelligence unit Phantom
GHQ Liaison Regiment
GHQ Liaison Regiment was a special reconnaissance unit first formed in 1939 during the early stages of World War II and based at Pembroke Lodge, a Georgian house in Richmond Park, London.- History :...

, which had SAS
Special Air Service
Special Air Service or SAS is a corps of the British Army constituted on 31 May 1950. They are part of the United Kingdom Special Forces and have served as a model for the special forces of many other countries all over the world...

 connections, though he was never in the front line.

After the War

In 1945, Oakeshott was demobilized and returned to Cambridge for two years. In 1947, he left Cambridge for Nuffield College, Oxford
Nuffield College, Oxford
Nuffield College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England. It is an all-graduate college and primarily a research establishment, specialising in the social sciences, particularly economics, politics and sociology. It is a research centre in the social sciences...

. After only a year, he secured an appointment as Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics
London School of Economics
The London School of Economics and Political Science is a public research university specialised in the social sciences located in London, United Kingdom, and a constituent college of the federal University of London...

 (LSE), succeeding Harold Laski
Harold Laski
Harold Joseph Laski was a British Marxist, political theorist, economist, author, and lecturer, who served as the chairman of the Labour Party during 1945-1946, and was a professor at the LSE from 1926 to 1950....

. He was deeply unsympathetic to the student action at LSE that occurred in the late 1960s, on the grounds that it disrupted the aims of the university. Oakeshott retired from LSE in 1969.

Oakeshott refused an offer of Knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II, for which he was proposed by Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher, was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990...

.

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 arose 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 Hegel and Bradley
F. H. Bradley
Francis Herbert Bradley, OM, was a British idealist philosopher.- Life :Bradley was born at Clapham, Surrey, England . He was the child of Charles Bradley, an evangelical preacher, and Emma Linton, Charles's second wife. A. C. Bradley was his brother...

; commentators also noticed resemblances between this work and the ideas of thinkers such as Collingwood
R. G. Collingwood
Robin George Collingwood was a British philosopher and historian. He was born at Cartmel, Grange-over-Sands in Lancashire, the son of the academic W. G. Collingwood, and was educated at Rugby School and at University College, Oxford, where he read Greats...

 and Simmel
Georg Simmel
Georg Simmel was a major German sociologist, philosopher, and critic.Simmel was one of the first generation of German sociologists: his neo-Kantian approach laid the foundations for sociological antipositivism, asking 'What is society?' in a direct allusion to Kant's question 'What is nature?',...

.

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 you can take to understanding the world — natural science
Natural science
The natural sciences are branches of science that seek to elucidate the rules that govern the natural world by using empirical and scientific methods...

 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 R. G. Collingwood
R. G. Collingwood
Robin George Collingwood was a British philosopher and historian. He was born at Cartmel, Grange-over-Sands in Lancashire, the son of the academic W. G. Collingwood, and was educated at Rugby School and at University College, Oxford, where he read Greats...

, 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
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

 Britain was taking, in particular the acceptance of socialism
Socialism
Socialism is an economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and cooperative management of the economy; or a political philosophy advocating such a system. "Social ownership" may refer to any one of, or a combination of, the following: cooperative enterprises,...

, gained Oakeshott a reputation as a conservative, seeking to uphold the importance of tradition, and sceptical about rationalism
Rationalism
In epistemology and in its modern sense, rationalism is "any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification" . In more technical terms, it is a method or a theory "in which the criterion of the truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive"...

 and fixed ideologies
Ideology
An ideology is a set of ideas that constitutes one's goals, expectations, and actions. An ideology can be thought of as a comprehensive vision, as a way of looking at things , as in common sense and several philosophical tendencies , or a set of ideas proposed by the dominant class of a society to...

. Bernard Crick
Bernard Crick
Sir Bernard Rowland Crick was a British political theorist and democratic socialist whose views were often summarised as "politics is ethics done in public"...

 described him as a 'lonely nihilist
Nihilism
Nihilism is the philosophical doctrine suggesting the negation of one or more putatively meaningful aspects of life. Most commonly, nihilism is presented in the form of existential nihilism which argues that life is without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value...

'.

Oakeshott's opposition to what he saw as Utopian political projects is summed up in his use of the image (possibly borrowed from the Marquess of Halifax
George Savile, 1st Marquess of Halifax
George Savile, 1st Marquess of Halifax PC was an English statesman, writer, and politician.-Family and early life, 1633–1667:...

, 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
Bolshevik
The Bolsheviks, originally also Bolshevists , derived from bol'shinstvo, "majority") were a faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which split apart from the Menshevik faction at the Second Party Congress in 1903....

 regime, taking some of its propaganda at face value.

Towards On Human Conduct

In his essay On Being Conservative (1956), he explained what he regarded as the conservative disposition. According to Oakeshott, “To be conservative, then, 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 removed from party politics
Political party
A political party is a political organization that typically seeks to influence government policy, usually by nominating their own candidates and trying to seat them in political office. Parties participate in electoral campaigns, educational outreach or protest actions...

 of any persuasion. It was divided into three parts. The first part develops a theory
Theory
The English word theory was derived from a technical term in Ancient Greek philosophy. The word theoria, , meant "a looking at, viewing, beholding", and referring to contemplation or speculation, as opposed to action...

 of human action as the exercise of intelligent agency in activities such as wanting and choosing, the second discusses the formal conditions of association appropriate to such intelligent agents, described as 'civil' or legal association, and the third examines how far this understanding of human association has affected politics and political ideas in post-Renaissance European history.

Oakeshott suggested that there had been two major schools of political thought. In the first, which he called 'enterprise' association, the state
Sovereign state
A sovereign state, or simply, state, is a state with a defined territory on which it exercises internal and external sovereignty, a permanent population, a government, and the capacity to enter into relations with other sovereign states. It is also normally understood to be a state which is neither...

 was understood as imposing some universal purpose (profit
Profit (economics)
In economics, the term profit has two related but distinct meanings. Normal profit represents the total opportunity costs of a venture to an entrepreneur or investor, whilst economic profit In economics, the term profit has two related but distinct meanings. Normal profit represents the total...

, salvation
Salvation
Within religion salvation is the phenomenon of being saved from the undesirable condition of bondage or suffering experienced by the psyche or soul that has arisen as a result of unskillful or immoral actions generically referred to as sins. Salvation may also be called "deliverance" or...

, progress, racial domination) on its subjects in which they were forced to participate. 'Civil' association however was primarily a legal relationship, in which laws imposed obligatory conditions of action but did not require choosing one action rather than another.

In his posthumously published, The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism, Oakeshott describes the 'enterprise' and the 'civil' association in different terms. An 'enterprise' association is seen as based in a fundamental faith in the ability of the human to ascertain and grasp some universal "good" (i.e. the Politics of Faith), and the 'civil' association is seen as based in a fundamental scepticism about the human ability to either ascertain or achieve this universal "good" (i.e. the Politics of Scepticism). Oakeshott saw power (especially technological power) as a necessary prerequisite for the Politics of Faith, because a) it allowed people to believe that they could achieve something great (e.g. something universally good), and b) it allowed them to implement the policies necessary to achieve this 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 used the analogy of the adverb
Adverb
An adverb is a part of speech that modifies verbs or any part of speech other than a noun . Adverbs can modify verbs, adjectives , clauses, sentences, and other adverbs....

 to describe the kind of restraint law involves. For example, the law against murder is not a law against killing as such, but only a law against killing 'murderously'. Or, a more trivial example, the law does not dictate that I have a car, but if I do, I have to drive it on the same side of the road as everybody else. This contrasted with the rules of enterprise association in which those actions required by the directing purpose were made compulsory for all.

The complex and often technical style of On Human Conduct found few readers. Its initial reception was mostly one of bafflement, and Oakeshott, who rarely replied to his critics, was sarcastic about some of the contributions made in a symposium on the book published in the journal Political Theory in 1976.

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.

In the mid-1960s, Oakeshott declared an admiration for Wilhelm Dilthey
Wilhelm Dilthey
Wilhelm Dilthey was a German historian, psychologist, sociologist and hermeneutic philosopher, who held Hegel's Chair in Philosophy at the University of Berlin. As a polymathic philosopher, working in a modern research university, Dilthey's research interests revolved around questions of...

, 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
Jurisprudence
Jurisprudence is the theory and philosophy of law. Scholars of jurisprudence, or legal theorists , hope to obtain a deeper understanding of the nature of law, of legal reasoning, legal systems and of legal institutions...

 ('The Rule of Law') and a pessimistic re-telling in the modern setting of the story of 'The Tower of Babel', in which modern Western societies fall victim to their own materialism and greed. It is no surprise, given this dislike of much contemporary society, that in his retirement Oakeshott retreated to live quietly in a country cottage in Langton Matravers
Langton Matravers
Langton Matravers is a small village on the Isle of Purbeck, in the county of Dorset in the south of England.Langton Matravers is part of the Purbeck local government district and is within the South Dorset constituency of the House of Commons and the South West England constituency of the European...

 in Dorset
Dorset
Dorset , is a county in South West England on the English Channel coast. The county town is Dorchester which is situated in the south. The Hampshire towns of Bournemouth and Christchurch joined the county with the reorganisation of local government in 1974...

. He lived long enough to see growing recognition, although he has become far more widely written about since his death.

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
Liberalism
Liberalism is the belief in the importance of liberty and equal rights. Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but generally, liberals support ideas such as constitutionalism, liberal democracy, free and fair elections, human rights,...

, national socialism
Nazism
Nazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...

, fascism
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...

, communism
Communism
Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...

, and Roman Catholicism (1939). He was editor of an edition of Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury , in some older texts Thomas Hobbs of Malmsbury, was an English philosopher, best known today for his work on political philosophy...

's Leviathan
Leviathan (book)
Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Common Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil — commonly called simply Leviathan — is a book written by Thomas Hobbes and published in 1651. Its name derives from the biblical Leviathan...

(1946), for which he provided an introduction recognized as a significant contribution to the literature by later scholars such as Quentin Skinner
Quentin Skinner
Quentin Robert Duthie Skinner is the Barber Beaumont Professor of the Humanities at Queen Mary, University of London.-Biography:...

. Several of his essays on Hobbes were published in 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 gave his blessing to 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
London School of Economics
The London School of Economics and Political Science is a public research university specialised in the social sciences located in London, United Kingdom, and a constituent college of the federal University of London...

. Further volumes of posthumous writings are in preparation, as is a biography, and the first decade of the 21st century has seen the publication of a series of monographs devoted to his work.

Books by Oakeshott

  • 1933. Experience and Its Modes. Cambridge University Press
  • 1962. Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays. Methuen (Expanded edition - 1991, by Liberty Fund)
  • 1975. On Human Conduct. Clarendon Press
  • 1975. Hobbes on Civil Association. Basil Blackwell
  • 1983. On History and Other Essays. Basil Blackwell
  • 1989. The Voice of Liberal Learning. Yale University Press

Posthumous

  • 1993. Morality and Politics in Modern Europe. Yale University Press
  • 1993. Religion, Politics, and the Moral Life. Yale University Press
  • 1996. The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Skepticism. Yale University Press
  • 2004. What Is History? And Other Essays. Imprint Academic
  • 2006. Lectures in the History of Political Thought. Imprint Academic
  • 2007. The Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence. Imprint Academic

Secondary sources

Recent works on Oakeshott include:
  • 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 0-907845-665)
  • Paul Franco
    Paul Franco
    Paul N. Franco is a professor of government at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine and a leading authority on the British political philosopher Michael Oakeshott....

    , 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 978-3-935063-09-8)
  • Andrew Sullivan
    Andrew Sullivan
    Andrew Michael Sullivan is an English author, editor, political commentator and blogger. He describes himself as a political conservative. He has focused on American political life....

    , Intimations Pursued: The Voice of Practice in the Conversation of Michael Oakeshott (Imprint Academic, 2007)

External links

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