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The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott. By Terry Nardin. University Park: Pennsylvania State Press, 2001. 264p. $35.00
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 January 2004
Extract
“Every man, I suppose, has his political opinions,” Michael Oakeshott once asserted, “but a political philosopher has something more, and more significant, than political opinions: he has an analysis of political activity, a comprehensive view of the nature of political life, and it is this … which is profitable for a later and different age to study” (Oakeshott, “Thomas Hobbes,” Scrutiny 4 [1935–36]: 265). Terry Nardin seems inspired by Oakeshott to take this attitude a step further, as if to say a political philosopher may have an analysis of political activity, but a philosopher has something more significant, a comprehensive view of human experience, and it is this that is profitable for a later age to study. Thus, the title of Nardin's book, The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott holds the nugget of his thesis: Michael Oakeshott was a philosopher, and it is as a philosopher, not a political theorist or a moralist or a historian of ideas, that we must first come to know him.
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- 2003 by the American Political Science Association