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On Michael Oakeshott1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Ian Holliday
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Extract

Michael Oakeshott was one of this country's and one of this century's leading writers on politics, contributing both a series of incisive commentaries and a number of profoundly original essays to our understanding. Chiefly through his writings on Hobbes — many of which were collected in Hobbes on Civil Association (1975) — and through his two major sets of essays on original themes — published as Rationalism in Politics (1962) and On Human Conduc (1975) — Oakeshott secure1 established himself in the pantheon of great political theorists.2

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Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 27 , Issue 2 , 01 April 1992 , pp. 131 - 147
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1992

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References

2 Oakeshott himself preferred the term ‘civil theorist’.

3 Quinton, Anthony, The Politics of Imperfection: The Religious and Secular Traditions of Conservative Thought in England from Hooker to Oakeshott, London, Faber, 1978.Google Scholar

4 Coats, Jr, ‘Michael Oakeshott as Liberal Theorist’, Canadian Journal of Political Science, 18, 1985, pp. 773–87;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Franco, Paul, Wendell, John, The Political Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1990;Google Scholar Gray, John, Liberalisms: Essays in Political Philosophy, London, Routledge, 1989, ch. 11.Google Scholar

5 A further category, poetry or art, is theorized in The Voice of poetry in the Conversation of Mankind, 1959.

6 Gray, op. cit., cites the possibility of communist countries passing laws allowing freedom of expression provided that it is engaged in ‘unbourgeoisly’, or permitting meetings of people so long as they do not act ‘prayerfully’.

7 Parekh, Bhikhu, ‘Michael Oakeshott’, in Contemporary Political Thinkers, Oxford, Martin Robertson, 1982, pp. 96–123.Google Scholar

8 James Tully shows how Locke’s natural law theory leads directly to the Rawlsian position and democratic socialism in ‘Locke on Liberty’, in Pelczynski, Zbigniew and Gray, John (eds), Conceptions of Liberty in Political Philosophy, London, Athlone Press, 1984, pp. 57–82.Google Scholar

9 Sandel, Michael J. (ed.), Liberalism and Its Critics, Oxford, Blackwell, 1984.Google Scholar

10 A discussion of the centrality of power to liberal debate may be found in Ackerman, Bruce A., Social Justice in the Liberal State, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1980.Google Scholar

11 On Human Conduct has been accorded an appropriate response. Outside a small band of political theorists, few even know it exists. The contrast with reception of A Theory of Justice, in particular, and Anarchy, State, and Utopia, is significant. Each was gratefully seized by anxious liberals and libertarians relieved to have a proper theory with which to rebut the claims of increasingly dominant Marxists. To such people, Oakeshott’s book was of little use.