1. One obituary, however, was excellent — the one produced by Dr.O'sullivan, Noël and Professor Parekh, Bhikhu (of the University of Hull) for the LondonIndependent (22 12 1990).Google Scholar And the Oakeshott-appreciation published by Dr.Sullivan, Andrew in The New Republic (6 05 1991, p. 42)Google Scholar was also very fine.

2. Oakeshott, Michael, Experience and Its Modes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933), p. 247.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. Ibid., pp. 304, 355.

4. Hegel, , Phenomenology of Mind, trans. Baillie, J. B. (New York: Harper Torchbacks, 1967), pp. 613 ff.Google Scholar Oakeshott may also have been thinking of the passage in the Preface to the Philosophy of Right in which Hegel complains that those who neglect the satisfyingly actual for what “ought” to be are guilty of “empty, one-sided ratiocination” (trans. Knox, T. M. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942], p. 10)Google Scholar.

5. Oakeshott, Michael, Introduction to Hobbes's Leviathan (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1946), pp. ix-x.Google Scholar (Republished, with small revisions, in Hobbes on Civil Association [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975], pp. 4–5.Google Scholar)

6. There was no adequate essay indicating the depth of Oakeshott's attachment to Aristotle until the appearance of the previously unpublished manuscript called “Political Discourse” in the new edition of Rationalism in Politics, edited by Fuller, Timothy (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1991), pp. 77 ff.Google Scholar In this wonderful piece, with its imaginative reading of Aristotle's Rhetoric, Aristotle is shown to be offering a “mode” of discourse which is designed “to persuade but without being able to prove—in contrast to Plato's effort to provide geometric “demonstration” through his notion of an ideal “absolute justice” (Phaedo 75d).

7. Oakeshott, Michael, “Thomas Hobbes,” in Scrutiny 4 (1935–1936): 265.Google Scholar

8. Cited in Shklar, Judith, Freedom and Independence: The Political Ideas of Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 3.Google Scholar

9. Oakeshott, Michael, “The New Bentham,” in Scrutiny 1 (1932): 131.Google Scholar(Republished in the new edition of Rationalism in Politics, ed. Fuller, , pp. 132 ff.).Google Scholar

10. Oakeshott, , Experience and Its Modes, p. 265.Google Scholar

11. Oakeshott, Michael, “The Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence,” Politica 3 (1938): 346–47.Google Scholar This hitherto neglected piece has now been well-treated by Franco, Paul in The Political Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 69–80.Google Scholar

12. Oakeshott, Michael, “Political Education,” in Rationalism in Politics (London: Methuen, 1962), p. 128.Google Scholar

13. Weldon, T. D., The Vocabulary of Politics (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1953), chap. 1,Google Scholar for the notion that philosophy merely “tidies up verbal contusions” in ordinary language.

14. Oakeshott, , “Political Education,” pp. 118–19.Google Scholar Surely Oakeshott takes this to be true of (say) Locke's Two Treatises. But when he turns to The Republic or Leviathan or the Philosophy of Right he speaks of “mediating between politics and eternity.” What is left a little obscure is what separates the eternal “masterpiece” from the mere “abridgement” of experience.

15. Oakeshott, , “Rationalism in Politics,” in Rationalism in Politics, p. 18.Google Scholar

16. Oakeshott, , “Political Education,” p. 114.Google Scholar Oakeshott's irreverent comic side, his irrepressible delight in provocation, is well brought out by Crick's, Bernard essay (“The Ambiguity of Michael Oakeshott”) in the Oakeshott-symposium published in The Cambridge Review 112 (10 1991): 120 ff.Google Scholar

17. Ibid. (“Political Education”), p. 121. At Oakeshott's Dorset cottage, a game pie would be homely enough to sustain this simile; in this country the exoticism of such a dish weakens his point.

18. Oakeshott, Michael, “John Locke,” in The Cambridge Review 54 (1932-1933): 73.Google Scholar

19. Oakeshott, , “Thomas Hobbes,” p. 274Google Scholar: “Radicalism, extravagance, the intrepid following out of a theory conceived in the grand manner and the absence of any sign of alarm, dismay or compromise are not qualities often to be found in English thinkers; but they flourish in Hobbes almost unchecked… Hobbes appears never to have been even tempted to make his conclusions more moderate.”

20. Oakeshott, Michael, “The Moral Life in the Writings of Thomas Hobbes,” in Rationalism in Politics, pp. 248–300.Google Scholar

21. Hobbes, , Leviathan, ed. Oakeshott, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1946), chap. XV, p. 94Google Scholar: “the original of justice [is] the making of covenants.” For the meaning of “covenant” in Hobbes (as contrasted with an older understanding such as Bossuet's), see Riley, Patrick (trans, and ed.), Bossuet, , Politics drawn from the Very Words of Holy Scripture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), “Introduction,” pp. lvii ff.Google Scholar

22. Oakeshott, , “Introduction” to Leviathan, pp. xi-xii.Google Scholar My own book, Will and Political Legitimacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982)Google Scholar, was inspired by this observation.

23. Oakeshott, Michael, “Dr. Leo Strauss on Hobbes,” in Hobbes on Civil Association, pp. 147–48.Google Scholar This complaint is clearly made from the perspective of Hegel's theory of the will in Philosophy of Right, sections 11 ff., (Knox. trans, p. 25 ff.); one would not expect Hegel (any more than Kant) to be satisfied with the Hobbesian notion that free-will is an incoherent Scholastic “absurdity,” that will is the last of (any) “appetites.” If Hegel was distressed by the Kantian notion that a good will is the “only unqualifiedly good thing on earth,” he nonetheless insisted (Philosophy of Right, section 57, Knox. trans, p. 48) that the “science of right” begins with “the position of the free will.” For Hegel's unusual version of voluntarism— in which “real” will recognizes the state as rational freedom satisfyingly “actualized” —see Kelly, George A., Hegel's Retreat from Eleusis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978)Google Scholar, chap. 5, passim.

24. Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Oakeshott, chap. VI (passim).

25. Oakeshott, Michael, “Logos and Telos,” in Government and Opposition 9 (Spring 1974): 242–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar (Republished in the new edition of Rationalism in Politics, ed. Fuller, , p. 351 ff.Google Scholar)

26. Ibid.

27. Hegel, , Phenomenology, trans. Baillie, , pp. 229 ff.Google Scholar

28. Michael Oakeshott, paper from 1963, included with a letter to the author in May 1990. In none of his other essays on Hobbes does Oakeshott read Hobbes in so “Hegelian” a way.

29. Oakeshott, , “Introduction” to Leviathan., p. viii.Google Scholar

30. Oakeshott, , “On Being Conservative,” in Rationalism in Politics, p. 189.Google Scholar

31. Oakeshott, Michael, On Human Conduct (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975).Google Scholar For Oakeshott's slightly testy defense of this work against his critics, see “Reply to my Critics,” in Political Theory 4 (1976).Google Scholar

32. Ibid., chap. 1, “On the Theoretical Understanding of Human conduct,” esp. pp. 37 ff. Cf. p. 112. “‘Human conduct' is ‚free’ (that is, intelligent) agents disclosing and enacting themselves by responding to their understood contingent situations in chosen actions and utterances related to imagined and wished-for satisfactions.“ This is clear, but as dense as Kant's Grundiegung; it is no wonder that some readers failed to be charmed.

33. Ibid., chap. 2, “On the Civil Condition,” pp. 147–48.

34. Ibid., pp. 152 ff.

35. Ibid., chap. 2, passim.

36. Ibid., chap. 3, “On the Character of a Modern European State,” p. 260.

37. Ibid., pp. 280 ff. For a more considered onslaught against Marx, see “Political Discourse,” in the new edition of Rationalism in Politics, ed. Fuller, , pp. 87 ff.Google Scholar For Oakeshott's animadversions against Rousseau's volonté générale, see Ibid., pp. 34–85.

38. Oakeshott, , On Human Conduct, pp. 240–41.Google Scholar

39. Ibid., p. 241.

40. Ibid., p. 324. The last few pages of On Human Conduct have the glowing gracefulness of Oakeshott's best writing.

41. Nietzsche, The Turilight of the Idols, “What the Germans Lack,” part 4.

42. Oakeshott, Michael, “The Claims of Politics,” Scrutiny 7 (1939): 148–50.Google Scholar

43. Hegel, , Philosophy of Right, trans. Knox, , pp. 89–90.Google Scholar

44. Michael Oakeshott, “The Masses in Representative Democracy,” in the new edition of Rationalism in Politics, ed. Fuller, , pp. 367–68.Google Scholar

45. Letter from Michael Oakeshott to the author, 1988 (previously unpublished). N. B.: To be avoided at all cost is the villification of Oakeshott as a crypro-Fascist served up by Anderson, Perry in “The Intransigent Right” (London Review of Books, 24 09 1992, pp. 7–11).Google Scholar Anderson's method is that of guilt by (remote) association: some of Oakeshott's thoughts (allegedly) resemble those of Fried rich von Hayek; but Hayek was the disciple of Ludwig von Mises; and von Mises supported the pro-Mussolini, clerical-fascist regime of Dollfüss in the mid thirties; ergo… Worst of all, however, is Anderson's conviction that all scholarly concerns must be driven by (sinister) political commitments: Oakeshott admired Hobbes, we are told, because “there is no place for rights in [Hobbes's] scheme of things… there is no cant about consent: just a limpid statement of duty—obedience to civil authority. It was this that drew Oakeshott.” This is so grotesque, both as an “account” of Hobbes and as an “explanation” of Oakeshott's interest in him, that one hardly knows where to begin. The notion that “consent” and “rights” have no place in Leviathan cannot survive a cursory glance at that work—let alone a careful and intelligent reading. And the idea that Oakeshott was in love with “obedience” would be outrageous if it were not so funny.