Michael Oakeshott

Oakeshott’s opposition to political utopianism is summed up in his analogy (possibly borrowed from a pamphlet by the 17th-century statesman George Savile, 1st Marquess of Halifax, The Character of a Trimmer) of a ship of state that has “neither starting-place nor appointed destination…[and where] the enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel”. He was a severe critic of E. H. Carr, the Cambridge historian of Soviet Russia, claiming that Carr was fatally uncritical of the Bolshevik regime and took some of its propaganda at face value.

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 officially a historian. Some of his very early essays are on religion (of a Christian ‘modernist’ kind), though after his first marital break-up (c. 1934) he published no more on the topic except for a couple of pages in his magnum opus On Human Conduct. However, his posthumously published and voluminous Notebooks (1919-) show a lifelong preoccupation with religion and questions of mortality. In his youth he had considered taking Holy Orders, but later inclined towards a non-specific Romantic mysticism.

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 (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; and The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism (1996), an already-mentioned manuscript from the 1950s contemporary with much of Rationalism in Politics but written in a more considered tone.

In the final work that Oakeshott published in his lifetime, On History (1983), he returned to the idea that history is a distinct mode of experience, but this time building on the theory of action developed in On Human Conduct. Much of On History had emerged from Oakeshott’s post-retirement graduate seminars at LSE, and had been written at the same time as On Human Conduct, in the early 1970s.

Oakeshott’s political philosophy, as advanced in On Human Conduct (1975), is free of any recognisable 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.

During this period, Oakeshott published what became his best known work during his lifetime, the collection entitled Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (1962), and notable for its elegance of style. Some of his near-polemics against the direction that Britain was taking, in particular towards socialism, gained Oakeshott a reputation as a traditionalist conservative, sceptical about rationalism and rigid ideologies. Bernard Crick described him as a “lonely nihilist”.

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.

In his essay “On Being Conservative” (1956) Oakeshott characterised conservatism as a disposition rather than a political stance: “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.”

In 1945 Oakeshott was demobilised and returned to Cambridge. In 1949 he left Cambridge for Nuffield College, Oxford, but after only two years, in 1951, he was appointed Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics (LSE), succeeding the leftist Harold Laski, an appointment noted by the popular press. Oakeshott was deeply unsympathetic to the student activism at LSE during the late 1960s, and highly critical of (as he saw it) the authorities’ insufficiently robust response. He retired from the LSE in 1969, but continued teaching and conducting seminars until 1980.

Although in his essay “The Claim of Politics” (1939), Oakeshott defended individuals’ right to eschew political commitment, he joined the British Army after the fall of France in 1940, when he could have avoided conscription on grounds of age. He volunteered for the virtually suicidal Special Operations Executive (SOE), where the average life expectancy was about six weeks, and was interviewed by Hugh Trevor-Roper, but it was decided that he was “too unmistakably English” to conduct covert operations on the Continent. He saw active service in Europe with the battlefield intelligence unit Phantom, a semi-freelance quasi-Signals organisation which also had connections with the Special Air Service (SAS). Though always at the front, the unit was seldom directly involved in any actual fighting. Oakeshott’s military competence did not go unnoticed, and he ended the war as Adjutant of Phantom’s ‘B’ Squadron and acting major.

Oakeshott’s other works included a reader, already mentioned, on The Social and Political Doctrines of Contemporary Europe. It consisted of selected texts illustrating the main doctrines of liberalism, national socialism, fascism, communism, and Roman Catholicism (1939). He edited Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1946), with an introduction that has been recognised as a significant contribution to the literature by some later scholars. Several of Oakeshott’s writings on Hobbes were collected and published in 1975 as Hobbes on Civil Association.

With his Cambridge colleague Guy Thompson Griffith Oakeshott wrote 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 published non-academic work.

Oakeshott published his first book in 1933, Experience and its Modes, when he was thirty-one. He acknowledged the influence of 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.

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 Nazism and Marxism. He is said to have been the first at Cambridge to lecture on Marx. At the suggestion of Sir Ernest Barker, who wished to see Oakeshott succeed to his own Cambridge Chair of Political Science, in 1939 he produced an anthology, with commentary, of The Social and Political Doctrines of Contemporary Europe. For all its muddle and incoherence (as he saw it), he found Representative Democracy the least unsatisfactory, in part because ‘the imposition of a universal plan of life on a society is at once stupid and immoral’.

After graduation in 1923 he pursued his interests in theology and German literature in a summer course at the Universities of Marburg and Tuebingen, and again in 1925. In between, for a year, he taught literature as Senior English Master at King Edward VII Grammar School, Lytham St Anne’s, while simultaneously writing his (successful) Fellowship dissertation, which he said was a ‘dry run’ for his first book, Experience and its Modes.

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 a series of monographs devoted to his work were published during the first decade of the 21st century, and continue to be produced.

Michael Oakeshott attended St George’s School, Harpenden, a new co-educational and ‘progressive’ boarding school from 1912 to 1920. He enjoyed his schooldays, and the Headmaster, the Rev. Cecil Grant, a disciple of Maria Montessori, later became a friend. In 1920, Oakeshott matriculated with a Scholarship at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he read history, taking the Political Science options in both parts of the Tripos (Cambridge degree examinations). He graduated in 1923 with a first-class degree, subsequently (as is still normal at Cambridge) took an unexamined MA, and was elected a Fellow of Caius in 1925. While at Cambridge he admired the British idealist philosophers J. M. E. McTaggart and John Grote, and the medieval historian Zachary Nugent Brooke. He said that McTaggart’s introductory lectures were the only formal philosophical training he ever received. The historian Herbert Butterfield was a contemporary, friend and fellow member of the Junior Historians society.

Michael Joseph Oakeshott FBA (/ˈoʊkʃɒt/; 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.