Book Review: The Three Faces of Oakeshott
| Author | Suvi Soininen |
| Published date | 01 January 2005 |
| Date | 01 January 2005 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1474885105048052 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
The Three Faces of Oakeshott
Suvi Soininen University of Jyväskylä, Finland
Anthony Farr Sartre’s Radicalism and Oakeshott’s Conservatism. New York: St Martin’s
Press, 1998.
Steven Gerencser The Skeptic’s Oakeshott. New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000.
Terry Nardin The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 2001.
For Oakeshott, a good philosopher always produces a new understanding which is simulta-
neously a new ‘not-yet-understood’ and therefore an invitation to understand.1The three
recent books reviewed here each already, by their mere existence, certify Oakeshott’s
own success in fulfilling this criterion. What makes these books interesting is that read
together they also display the versatility of Oakeshott’s thought. Differing aspects and
nuances of Oakeshott’s work are revealed as each author provides us with a profiled,
perspectivist interpretation. In Terry Nardin’s book we encounter Oakeshott the philoso-
pher, whereas Anthony Farr and Steven Gerencser approach his character as a political
philosopher. Accordingly, the writers differ in their contextualization of Oakeshott’s
oeuvre, thus enabling a reflection on different levels of thinking, from practical politics to
the history of philosophy.
In his book, Anthony Farr aims at construing the relationship between two major
thinkers of the last century: Jean-Paul Sartre and Michael Oakeshott. As the title of the
book, Sartre’s Radicalism and Oakeshott’s Conservatism, already implies, he operates with a
rather conventional classification of the left and right in relation to political thinking.
Sartre’s and Oakeshott’s conceptions of freedom, radicalism and conservatism are high-
lighted as decisive features which assign their placement in the political continuum. In
addition, Farr provides us with an overview of the history of philosophy in order to put the
conceptual divisions he uses into context: such a broad range of thinkers as Descartes, Kant,
Hegel, Husserl and Kierkegaard are discussed on the general level of ‘nature and mind’ and
in terms of their different conceptions of the self.
This part of the book seems to me – to use Farr’s own expression – to be an ‘obligatory’
academic discussion, which the book would have been better off without. Here, these
109
review article
Contact address: Suvi Soininen, Department of Philosophy and Social Sciences,
University of Jyväskylä, PO Box 35, 40014, Finland.
Email: sumaso@cc.jyu.fi
EJPT
European Journal
of Political Theory
© SAGE Publications Ltd,
London, Thousand Oaks
and New Delhi
issn 1474-8851, 4(1)109–118
[DOI: 10.1177/1474885105048052]
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