Background
Oakeshott, Michael Joseph was born in December 1901 in II, London.
Oakeshott, Michael Joseph was born in December 1901 in II, London.
St George’s School, Harpenden. Caius College, Cambridge. Marburg and Tübingen.
Fellow, Caius College, Cambridge, 1927-1948. Professor of Political Science, LSE, London, 1951-1968.
Michael Oakeshott’s academic employments were in History until the 1939 war and in political science after it, but his chief publication in the earlier period was a work of general philosophy and in the later on the philosophies of politics and history. Experience and Its Modes (1933) resembles the writings of F. H. Bradley in its general method and in the abstract hauteur of its approach, and is comparable in structure to Collingwood's Speculum Mentis in distinguishing experience into various ‘modes’—philosophyhistory, science and practice. Of these philosophy alone is complete and free from presuppositions, rather in the manner of Plato’s ‘dialectic’. The others survey experience from a particular point of view: as past events in the case of history, as a system of quantities in the case of science. In each there is no sharp distinction between thought and its objects, between experiencing and what is experienced. A striking new development was the political theory expounded in the essays of the period immediately after the war, collected in Rationalism in Politics (1962). Their main drift is that politics should not be conceived as an exercise of technical rationality, in which, under the guidance of science, means are chosen for specifically identified ends. The knowledge required for its successful conduct is implied knowledge-how, achieved by immersion in tradition and practical political experience. Polities does not pursue a goal, it is, rather, a task, that o( maintaining, above all by way of law, a settled order in which people can most adequately pursue their own purposes. There is no one ideal pattern of public order; different societies require different constitutional tailoring. Ideologies, laying down universal prescriptions, are illusions, misconstruing the historically developed rights of a particular community as a model for general application. An ideology, as he puts it, is an abridgment of a particular form of political experience wrongly presented as a regime for allinstrumental rationality is not wholly rejected; « properly animates what Oakeshott calls ‘enterprise associations’ in which people come together for the pursuit of a clearly identified common purpose, as contrasted with ‘civil associations. like a family, a club and, most importantly, the state. Oakeshott is a writer of elegantly mandarin prose, in which there is no place for detailed argument with specific opponents or for the interruption of scholarly footnotes. In adding 3 further mode, that of poetry or imaginative literature, to his original list, he presents a new image of their relations to each other. It is that o conversation, dialogue for its own sake, as contrasted with argument, dialogue intended to achieve a definite result. Oakeshott's genera philosophy has remained an object of distant. Puzzled respect but his political thinking has been highly influential on a generation of political theorists, among whom may be mentioned Roger Scruton and John Gray, who are. however, by no uieans simply disciples. He is without doubt the roost notable conservative political thinker of the second half of the twentieth century, perhaps, indeed, the most notable since Edmund Burke. Sources: W. H. Greenleaf (1966) Oakeshotts Philosophical Politics', Paul Franco (1990) The Political Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott.