A Guide to the Classics: The Skepticism of Professor Oakeshott

Abstract

P OLITICAL PHILOSOPHY MAY NOT HAVE given up ghost as some of weary affirm. If a faint pulse can still be detected it is because of energies of a few suggestive thinkers. One of most interesting of them and certainly least known is Professor Michael Oakeshott. His writing is scant but provocative. Experience and Its Modes (1933) was praised by R. G. Collingwood as the high water mark of English thought upon history . The introduction to Blackwell edition of Hobbes' Leviathan was soon acclaimed a brilliant essay. Political Education (1951), his inaugural address at London School of Economics where to chagrin of socialists he succeeded late Professor Laski, was honored by a leading article in Times Literary Supplement, and drew retorts cavalier iconoclast from Mr. R. H. S. Crossman and Proust of political science from Mr. H. G. Nicholas. Although Oakeshott's critics have been numerous, few have succeeded in penetrating his cosmos of ideas. This perhaps has been due to occasionally esoteric qualities of his artistry and to his failure to draw together tangled skeins of his thought. Moreover he is a conservative whose conservatism defies customary classification. Unlike neo-Burkians who have appeared in England and America since last war, he has shown little sympathy for mysticism of natural law or idea of a program for conservatism, preferring to call it an attitude or state of mind. An early Hegelianism lends credence to opinion that he is a kind of Anglicized existentialist. But his position is apparently even more ambiguous because of his sympathy for speculative moderation of David Hume, a fact that might make him intellectually more congenial to London School than to Carlton Club. Before political ideas of Professor Oakeshott can be appraised every effort should be made to determine their exact nature. The task here, therefore, is primarily to understand rather than to criticize. What is he attempting to say? One clue seems to be a