Michael Oakeshott: life, ideas and books

Life

Michael Oakeshott was born in Chelsfield, Kent, in 1901 and studied history at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, taking a first-class degree in 1923 and becoming a fellow in 1925. During the Second World War he served as an acting major in the Phantom reconnaissance unit. From 1949 he was at Nuffield College, Oxford, and in 1951 he became Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics, retiring in 1969 and teaching on until 1980. He died in 1990.

He declined a Companion of Honour that Margaret Thatcher proposed for him.

Ideas

Oakeshott's first major book, Experience and Its Modes (1933), argued that history, science and practical life are distinct ways of understanding the world, each with its own standards, and that none should be judged by the rules of another. That philosophical groundwork shaped his later politics.

In "Rationalism in Politics" and the essays collected under that title in 1962, he attacked the belief that political problems are technical puzzles solvable by a clear plan and a correct theory. Practical knowledge, he argued, is learned in practice and handed down in traditions; it cannot be fully reduced to a rulebook. His essay "On Being Conservative" (1956) described conservatism as a disposition to prefer the familiar to the unknown, the tried to the untried, and present enjoyment to utopian promise, rather than as a creed.

In On Human Conduct (1975) he distinguished two ways of understanding a state: as an "enterprise association", organised around a common purpose, and as a "civil association", a body of citizens bound only by shared rules which lay down conditions of conduct rather than prescribe goals.

Major works

• Experience and Its Modes (1933).
• An edition of Hobbes's Leviathan (1946).
• Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (1962).
• On Human Conduct (1975).
• On History and Other Essays (1983).
• The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism (published after his death, 1996).

Why conservatives read him

Oakeshott gives conservatism a philosophy without a platform. His skepticism about central planning overlaps with Friedrich Hayek's argument about dispersed knowledge, though Hayek himself separated the two views, and his stress on habit and inherited practice echoes Edmund Burke. His essays are short, elegant and often quoted by readers who distrust ideology of any kind, including their own side's.

His reception is mixed. The critic Bernard Crick called him a "lonely nihilist", and some on the right find his disposition too thin to guide a movement, since it describes a temperament more than a set of aims. Others see that thinness as the point: a conservative, on his account, is someone who wants to preserve a way of life while accepting that it will change, and who values the rule of law over the pursuit of a plan.