Michael Oakeshott: Notebooks, 1922-86

by Michael Oakeshott, Luke O'Sullivan (Editor)

From the 1920s to the 1980s Oakeshott filled dozens of notebooks with his private reflections, both personal and intellectual. Their contents range from aphorisms to miniature essays, forming a unique record of his intellectual trajectory over his entire career. This volume makes them accessible in print for the first time, drawing together a host of his previously inaccessible observations on politics, philosophy, art, education, and much else besides. Religion in particular emerges as an ongoing concern for him in a way that is not visible from his published works. The notebooks also provide a unique source of insight into Oakeshott's musings on life, thanks to the hitherto unsuspected existence of the series of 'Belle Dame' notebooks that were written in the late 1920s and early 1930s but which only came to light two decades after his death. At the same period in which he was developing the concepts that would form Experience and its Modes, Oakeshott's personal life lead him to ...

Genres: Philosophy

905 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 21, 2014

About the author

English philosopher and political theorist who wrote about philosophy of history, philosophy of religion, aesthetics, and philosophy of law. He is widely regarded as one of the most important conservative thinkers of the 20th century, although he has sometimes been characterized as a liberal thinker.
Oakeshott was dismayed by the descent into political extremism that took place in Europe in the 1930s, and his surviving lectures from this period reveal a dislike of National Socialism and Marxism.
In 1945, Oakeshott was demobilized and returned to Cambridge for two years. In 1947, he left Cambridge for Nuffield College, Oxford. After only a year, he secured an appointment as Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics (LSE), succeeding Harold Laski. He was deeply unsympathetic to the student action at LSE that occurred in the late 1960s, on the grounds that it disrupted the aims of the university. Oakeshott retired from LSE in 1969.
Oakeshott refused an offer of Knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II, for which he was proposed by Margaret Thatcher.