ncongruous places often inspire anomalous stories. In early 1984, I spent several nights at the Vatican housed in a hotel built for itinerant priests. While pondering over such puzzling issues as the intended function of the bidets in each bathroom, and hungering for something other than plum jam on my breakfast rolls (why did the basket only contain hundreds of identical plum packets and not a one of, say, strawberry?), I encountered yet another among the innumerable issues of contrasting cultures (...) that can make life so interesting. Our crowd (present in Rome for a meeting on nuclear winter sponsored by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences) shared the hotel with a group of French and Italian Jesuit priests who were also professional scientists. (shrink)

'The religious man will inherit nothing he cannot possess by actual insight... in place of an ideal of steady acquisition for some ulterior end in which, perhaps, he can never share, he will follow one which values it solely by its worth to present insight. And he will maintain a kind of candid detachment in the face of the very highest actual achievement.' -from 'Religion and the World'.

This highly readable new collection of thirty pieces by Michael Oakeshott, almost all of which are previously unpublished, covers every decade of his intellectual career, and adds significantly to his contributions to the philosophy of historical understanding and political philosophy, as well as to the philosophy of education and aesthetics. The essays were intended mostly for lectures or seminars, and are consequently in an informal style that will be accessible to new readers as well as to those already well acquainted (...) with Oakeshott's works. Early pieces include a long essay ‘On the Relations of Philosophy, Poetry, and Reality', and Oakeshott’s comments on ‘The Cambridge School of Political Science’ through which he himself had passed as an undergraduate. The collection also reproduces a substantial wartime essay ‘On Peace with Germany’. There are two new essays on the philosophy of education, and the essay which gives the work its title, ‘What is History?’, is just one of over half a dozen discussions of the nature of historical knowledge. Oakeshott’s later sceptical, ‘hermeneutic’, thought is also well represented by pieces such as ‘What is Political Theory?’ and ‘The Emergence of the History of Thought.’ Reviews of books by English and European contemporaries such as Butterfield, Hayek, Voegelin, and Arendt also help to place him in context more clearly than before. The book will be indispensable for all Oakeshott’s readers, no matter which area of his thought concerns them most. (shrink)

For much of his career, British political philosopher Michael Oakeshott was identified with Margaret Thatcher’s conservative policies. He has been called by some a guru to the Tories, while others have considered him one of the last proponents of British Idealism. Best known for such books as _Experience and Its Modes_ and _Rationalism in Politics_, Oakeshott has been the subject of numerous studies, but always with an emphasis on his political thought. Elizabeth Campbell Corey now makes the case that Oakeshott’s (...) moral and political philosophies are more informed by religious and aesthetic considerations than has previously been supposed. Hers is the first book-length study of this premise, arguing that Oakeshott’s views on aesthetics, religion, and morality are intimately linked in a creative moral personality that underlies his political theorizing. Corey focuses on a wealth of early material from Oakeshott’s career that has only recently been published, as well as his acclaimed “Tower of Babel” essays, to show that these works illuminate his thinking in ways that could not have been realized prior to their publication. She places Oakeshott squarely in the Augustinian tradition, citing his 1929 essay “Religion and the World,” and then identifies his departure from it. She explores Oakeshott’s recurring theme of “living one’s life in the present”; examines his explicit discussions of religion, aesthetics, and morality; and then considers his political thought in light of this moral vision. She finally compares his idea of Rationalism to Eric Voegelin’s concept of Gnosticism and considers both thinkers’ treatment of Hobbes to delineate their philosophical differences. Through this insightful analysis, Corey shows Oakeshott to be not merely a political philosopher but a thinker with humanistic interests—one who throughout his life was deeply interested in the question of what it means to be human and was moved by art, poetry, and religion while recognizing the necessary evil of political arrangements in order for those activities to flourish. Her work is a major step in a reevaluation of Oakeshott, showing that his conservatism has been greatly misunderstood and that he is more properly regarded as a philosopher whose vision of the human condition, while oftentimes detached and skeptical, is also romantic and inspired. (shrink)

In The Enemies of Perfection, author Debra Candreva argues that Plato's philosophy is among the most important influences on Oakeshott's thought, with his debts to Plato far outweighing his criticisms. Further, Candreva's examination of Oakeshott's treatment of Plato forms the basis of an argument against the view that a radical gap between ancient and modern thought renders ancient philosophy either inaccessible or irrelevant to current thinking.

This essay explores Oakeshott's life-long engagement with the political thought of Aristotle. By examining unpublished notebooks from the 1920's and comparing them with Oakeshott's published writings we find that Oakeshott's critique of Rationalism, his account of skillful human conduct and practical judgment, and even his account of civil association owe remarkable debts to Aristotle. In particular, Aristotle's critique of Platonic and Spartan perfectionism, is strongly echoed in Oakeshott's contrast between civil and enterprise association.

This dissertation is an assessment of the philosophical view of Michael Oakeshott and the value of the study of political philosophy in light of early notebooks he kept on the ancient Greek thinkers, primarily Plato. A close textual analysis of the notebooks reveals Oakeshott's unique philosophical position among the British Idealists. An analysis of his confrontation with the thought of the ancient Greeks helps us appreciate this unique position and understand the contribution Oakeshott makes to our understanding of political philosophy. (...) Oakeshott's reading of the ancient Greek thinkers, in his notebooks, reveals a mixture of powerful philosophical skepticism along with commitments to a philosophical monism he shared with other British Idealists. ;This mixture has surprising and important implications for political philosophy. In an unusual reading of the character of Socrates, Oakeshott sees a social conservatism and a philosophical radicalism emblematic of his own thinking and exemplary of the gap he understood to exist between philosophical activity and practical activity. Oakeshott understood philosophical activity to be primarily descriptive and explanatory. This understanding sheds new light on Oakeshott's brief and intermittent treatment of Plato in his published writing, but also results is an extremely subtle reading of Plato while critiquing the limits of Platonic theorizing. Though there are strong beginning points in Oakeshott's and Plato's theorizing of the state, Oakeshott thought Plato did not adequately theorize the state because he was too distracted with practical concerns. This reforming disposition carries over into the understanding of the philosophical study of politics of Plato, but also of neo-Platonists and skeptical historians of the history of political philosophy today. Oakeshott's critique of this over-concern with practical change prevents reflections on politics from rising to a level Oakeshott thought merited the name 'political philosophy'. Oakeshott's position offers an alternative to both the "perennial questions" approach and the contextualist approach, exemplified by Quentin Skinner. Oakeshott's insistence on a rather specific understanding of political philosophy is analyzed and tied to his view of the poetic quality of life and to the modern threat he saw emanating from the dominance of the practical viewpoint. (shrink)