The Idealist’s Oakeshott

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To return to the commencement of Michael Oakeshott’s intellectual career ironically requires examining the waning moments of a philosophical trend. Oakeshott studied at Cambridge with the last of the renowned British idealists from 1919 through the early twenties, attending lectures in philosophy by John Ellis McTaggert.1 Oakeshott’s early philosophical writings, and in particular his first major work, Experience and Its Modes, reveal the strong impress of his exposure to idealist philosophy. It may appear surprising or merely irrelevant that Oakeshott early on dabbled in a philosophy that many considered arcane to begin with and whose intellectual energy was dissipated at the time Oakeshott wrote. Instead, it is Oakeshott the eloquent essayist and conservative political philosopher that interests them. Hannah Fenichel Pitkin, for example, implies that Experience and Its Modes and the philosophical positions developed therein do not significantly contribute to an understanding of Oakeshott’s conservatism or his political philosophy. In a close examination of Oakeshott’s conservatism and its relationship to other forms of conservatism, Pitkin simply claims “An earlier work on epistemology, Experience and Its Modes, cannot be discussed within the confines of the essay.”2 At least she acknowledges this strategy. Many others simply write as if Oakeshott wrote nothing prior to the essays collected in Rationalism in Politics. I argue below, however, that Oakeshott’s skepticism, which is the grounding for his conservative disposition and the resulting political philosophy, can first be glimpsed during this early period, and so this stage should be understood as more than mere juvenilia.KeywordsCorrespondence TheoryConcrete ExperienceMental NatureCoherence TheoryPhilosophical ExperienceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.