Michael Oakeshott

Michael Joseph Oakeshott FBA (11 December 1901 – 19 December 1990) was an English philosopher and political theorist who wrote on the philosophies of history, religion, aesthetics, education, and law.

Oakeshott was the son of Joseph Francis Oakeshott, a civil servant (latterly divisional head in the Inland Revenue) and member of the Fabian Society, and Frances Maude, daughter of George Thistle Hellicar, a well-off Islington silk-merchant.

Though there is no evidence that he knew her, he was related by marriage to the women's rights activist Grace Oakeshott, and to the economist and social reformer Gilbert Slater.

Michael Oakeshott attended St George's School, Harpenden, a new co-educational and 'progressive' boarding school from 1912 to 1920.

He enjoyed his schooldays, and the Headmaster, the Rev. Cecil Grant, a disciple of Maria Montessori, later became a friend.

However, his posthumously published and voluminous Notebooks (1919-) show a lifelong preoccupation with religion and questions of mortality.

In his youth he had considered taking Holy Orders, but later inclined towards a non-specific Romantic mysticism.

In 1920, Oakeshott matriculated with a Scholarship at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he read history, taking the Political Science options in both parts of the Tripos (Cambridge degree examinations).

He graduated in 1923 with a first-class degree, subsequently (as is still normal at Cambridge) took an unexamined MA, and was elected a Fellow of Caius in 1925.

While at Cambridge he admired the British idealist philosophers J. M. E. McTaggart and John Grote, and the medieval historian Zachary Nugent Brooke.

He said that McTaggart's introductory lectures were the only formal philosophical training he ever received.

The historian Herbert Butterfield was a contemporary, friend and fellow member of the Junior Historians society.

After graduation in 1923 he pursued his interests in theology and German literature in a summer course at the universities of Marburg and Tübingen, and again in 1925.

In between, he taught literature for a year as Senior English Master at King Edward VII Grammar School, Lytham, while simultaneously writing his (successful) Fellowship dissertation, which he said was a 'dry run' for his first book, Experience and its Modes.

Oakeshott was dismayed by the political extremism that occurred in Europe during the 1930s, and his surviving lectures from this period reveal a dislike of Nazism and Marxism.

He is said to have been the first at Cambridge to lecture on Marx.

Oakeshott published his first book in 1933, Experience and its Modes, when he was thirty-one.

He acknowledged the influence of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and F. H. Bradley; commentators also noticed resemblances between this work and the ideas of thinkers such as R. G. Collingwood and Georg Simmel.

The book argued that our experience is usually modal, in the sense that we almost always have a governing perspective on the world, be it practical or theoretical.

One may take various theoretical approaches to the world: natural science, history and practice, for example, are quite separate, immiscible modes of experience.

Some of his very early essays are on religion (of a Christian 'modernist' kind), though after his first marital break-up (c. 1934) he published no more on the topic except for a couple of pages in his magnum opus, titled On Human Conduct.

At the suggestion of Sir Ernest Barker (who wished to see Oakeshott succeed to his own chair of political science at Cambridge), he produced an anthology, with commentary, in 1939, titled The Social and Political Doctrines of Contemporary Europe.

For all its muddle and incoherence (as he saw it), he found representative democracy the least unsatisfactory, in part because 'the imposition of a universal plan of life on a society is at once stupid and immoral'.

Although in his essay "The Claim of Politics" (1939), Oakeshott defended individuals' right to eschew political commitment, he joined the British Army after the autumn of 1940, when he could have avoided conscription on grounds of age.

He volunteered for the virtually suicidal Special Operations Executive (SOE), where the average life expectancy was about six weeks, and was interviewed by Hugh Trevor-Roper, but it was decided that he was "too unmistakably English" to conduct covert operations on the Continent.

He saw active service in Europe with the battlefield intelligence unit Phantom, a semi-freelance quasi-Signals organisation which also had connections with the Special Air Service (SAS).

Though always at the front, the unit was seldom directly involved in any actual fighting.

Oakeshott's military competence did not go unnoticed, and he ended the war as Adjutant of Phantom's 'B' Squadron and acting major.

In 1945 Oakeshott was demobilised and returned to Cambridge.

In 1949 he left Cambridge for Nuffield College, Oxford, but after only two years, in 1951, he was appointed Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics (LSE), succeeding the leftist Harold Laski, an appointment noted by the popular press.

Oakeshott was deeply unsympathetic to the student activism at LSE during the late 1960s, and highly critical of (what he saw as) the authorities' insufficiently robust response.

He retired from the LSE in 1969, but continued teaching and conducting seminars until 1980.

In his retirement he retreated to live quietly in a country cottage in Langton Matravers in Dorset with his third wife.

He was twice divorced and had numerous affairs, many of them with wives of his students, colleagues and friends, and even with his son Simon's girlfriend.

He also had a son out of wedlock, whom he abandoned together with the mother when the child was two, and whom he did not meet again for nearly twenty years.

Oakeshott's most famous lover was Iris Murdoch.

Oakeshott lived long enough to experience increasing recognition, although he has become much more widely written about since his death.

Oakeshott declined an offer to be made a Companion of Honour, for which he was proposed by Margaret Thatcher.

Oakeshott's early work, some of which has been published posthumously as ''What is History?

and Other Essays (2004) and The Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence'' (2007), shows that he was more interested in the philosophical problems that derived from his historical studies than he was in the history, even though he was officially a historian.