Michael Joseph Oakeshott Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Michael Joseph Oakeshott (1901–1990) was a British political philosopher interested in the philosophical questions raised by the study of history. His first published work, Experience and Its Modes (1933), examined three modes of experience: history, science, and practice. He argued that each of these modes or perspectives afforded a comprehensive, albeit circumscribed, way of thinking about the world. Each, therefore, tells more about how humans think than about what they should do, a perspective very much in keeping with Oakeshott’s view of philosophy, which held that people should be concerned with clarifying their own thoughts rather than trying to persuade, let alone convert, others.

Oakeshott studied history at Caius College in Cambridge and became a fellow in 1923. Amidst the turmoil of the 1930s, he enjoyed nonpolitical pursuits, including horseracing. With a Cambridge colleague, he coauthored A Guide to the Classics (1936), the aim of which was to pick Derby winners. While he publically defended the individual’s right to refrain from political activity, Oakeshott volunteered in 1941 to serve in the British army’s intelligence unit, Phantom.

Oakeshott returned to Cambridge after World War II (1939–1945) and completed his introduction to British philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1946) that established his reputation as a leading scholar on Hobbes. In 1951, Oakeshott succeeded political theorist Harold Laski as the chair of the government department at the London School of Economics and served until his retirement in 1969.

Oakeshott’s best-known book, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (1962), secured his place as a leading conservative thinker. Rejecting historical predestination, natural law, and other metaphysical abstractions, Oakeshott’s conservatism, however, sprung from a deeply rooted skepticism. No golden age in the past or in the future beckoned him. On the contrary, one must “delight in what is present rather than what was or what will be.” For him, this is what it means to be a conservative.

This skepticism, along with his “irredeemable secularism,” set Oakeshott apart from other conservatives. But neither did it endear him to radicals who, for the most part, did not delight in the here and now. His political philosophy, they complained, presupposed a world not so different from the one Oakeshott inhabited, but very different from the one inhabited by most people.

Oakeshott, however, had his reasons for not entirely embracing any one political philosophy. To do so, he believed, would close himself off from the unexpected insights that might result from keeping a conversation ongoing. Conversations do not require that the participants share the same philosophy. What Oakeshott desired was for people to be able to differ without disagreeing. Conversations, he implied, may not bring the participants closer to the truth, but they may bring them closer to each other. Quite possibly this outlook is what made him such a revered teacher and colleague.

Oakeshott died in his nineteenth-century cottage in Dorset, England, on December 19th, 1990.

Bibliography:

Cranston, Maurice. “Remembrances of Michael Oakeshott.” Political Theory 19, no. 3 (August 1991): 323–326.
Franco, Paul. Michael Oakeshott: An Introduction. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004.
Oakeshott, Michael. Experience and Its Modes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933.
Hobbes on Civil Association. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975.
Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays. Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 1991.
The Voice of Liberal Learning. Foreword and Introduction by Timothy Fuller. Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 1989.

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