Michael Joseph Oakeshott

The philosopher Michael Oakeshott wrote in 1956 that to be conservative “is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, ...

Politics, said the conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott, is more about temperament than it is about belief. It is a trade in emotion and vestigial feelings stripped of all logic. There is an obvious strategy for Labour MPs who want to ensure that the government cannot proceed with its Chequers plan to ...

Michael Joseph Oakeshott was born on 11th December 1901 in Chelsfield, Kent. His father was a civil servant in the Inland Revenue Department, and played a prominent role in the socialist Fabian Society. His mother Frances was a vicar's daughter who trained as a nurse, and ran a small military hospital during the ...

BORN AT THE OUTSET of a century that will be remembered as one of the bloodiest in history, Michael Oakeshott (1901–1990) must have had few reasons to feel at home in a world dominated by prophets of extremism, heralds of salvation and doom, and self-righteous philistines. A bohemian and ...

Yet at his death in 1990, aged 89, Michael Oakeshott did not lack public recognition. The Daily Telegraph described him as “the greatest political philosopher in the Anglo-Saxon tradition since Mill – or even Burke”. The Guardian called him “perhaps the most original academic political philosopher of this ...

Who or what was Michael Oakeshott? How many of our fellow citizens — how many even of the readers of this journal — could confidently answer the question? I guess, not many. One of the paradoxes of Britain's intellectual history is that a country which, alongside the Greeks and the Germans, has ...