Michael Joseph Oakeshott (11 December 1901 – 19 December 1990) was an English philosopher with particular interests in political thought, the philosophy of history, education, and religion, and aesthetics. He is now regarded as one of the significant conservative thinkers of the twentieth century.

Life

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His father, Joseph Oakeshott, was a civil servant and a leading member of the Fabian Society. The family moved in intellectual circles; George Bernard Shaw was a friend. Michael Oakeshott attended St. George's School, Harpenden from 1912 to 1920. He enjoyed his schooldays, and the Headmaster Cecil Grant later became a friend. In 1920 he went to Gonville and Caius College to read history, where he also took his MA, and subsequently became a Fellow. While at Cambridge, he admired tutors such as the last of the great Victorian British Idealist philosophers, J. Ellis McTaggart, and the medieval historian Zachary Nugent Brooke. The historian Herbert Butterfield was a contemporary and fellow member of the Junior Historians society to which Oakeshott presented several papers in the 1920s.

Oakeshott's early work, some of which has been published posthumously as What is History? And Other Essays (2004), shows that he became more interested in the philosophical problems arising from his historical studies than in being an historian himself at an early stage of his intellectual career. Although employed as an historian at Cambridge Oakeshott's first published book, Experience and its Modes (1933), was a work of philosophy. The book itself owed much to Hegel and F. H. Bradley, but also to Plato and Spinoza, from whom he took the vocabulary of modality. It argued that our experience is often modal, in the sense that we always have a governing perspective on the world, be it practical or theoretical. There were various theoretical approaches one could take to understanding the world — natural science and history were separate modes of experience — but they were distinct from one another. It was a mistake, he always argued, to treat history as if it ought to be practised on the model of the natural sciences.

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guess we should add Kirk, T.S. Eliot, Michael Oakeshott, Leo Strauss, Milton Friedman to make this a more serious list!
EncounterBooks (Encounter Books) Mon, 07 Dec 2009 16:22:06 -0000
guess we should add Kirk, T.S. Eliot, Michael Oakeshott, Leo Strauss, Milton Friedman to make this a more serious list!

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