Intimations of Oakeshott: A critical reading of his ‘Notebooks, 1922–86’
| Author | Michael Kenny,Luke O’Sullivan,David Hexter |
| Date | 01 January 2019 |
| Published date | 01 January 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1474885115627559 |
| Subject Matter | Review Articles |
E J P T
European Journal of Political Theory
2019, Vol. 18(1) 138–149
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Intimations of Oakeshott:
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A critical reading of his
DOI: 10.1177/1474885115627559
journals.sagepub.com/home/ept
‘Notebooks, 1922–86’
David Hexter and Michael Kenny
Queen Mary University of London, UK
Luke O’Sullivan (ed), Michael Oakeshott, Selected Writings,
Vol. VI: Notebooks, 1922–86 (2014). Imprint Academic: Exeter,
2014, 590 pp.
Abstract
The nature and worth of Michael Oakeshott’s contribution as a political thinker have
long been the subject of deep disagreement within the community of Anglophone
political theory. This is partly the product of a partial familiarity with Oakeshott’s
corpus. During his lifetime, his body of published work had a rather slender appearance,
comprising two major monographs, separated by some forty years, and two rather
more accessible collections of essays on politics and history. Following his death in
1990, however, a much larger body of writings has become available. In particular,
with the publication of his Notebooks, we are afforded the chance to form a nuanced
and informed understanding of how the thinking in his texts interconnected, and to
appreciate the range of intellectual influences and political preoccupations that charac-
terised his work.
Keywords
Oakeshott, civil association, romanticism, political philosophy, individualism
The nature and worth of Michael Oakeshott’s contribution as a political thinker
have long been the subject of deep disagreement within the community of
Anglophone political theory. In some circles he remains an important figure
who, despite the small number of his published works, deserves acclaim as the
source of some of the most important, philosophically hewn reflections on politics
to have emerged in British intellectual culture during the last century (Zuckert,
2009). And, while the band of those he influenced directly through his teaching and
Corresponding author:
Michael Kenny, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London E14NS, UK.
Email: m.kenny@qmul.ac.uk
Hexter and Kenny
139
scholarship
has
dwindled
quite
considerably
from
the point when the
‘Oakeshottians’ represented one of the most significant schools within British pol-
itical theory (Kelly, 2009), his work has continued to serve as a point of attraction
and interest. Most recently, he has been claimed as an ally for the enterprises
pursued by various contemporary theorists, including those seeking to delineate
a postmodernist trajectory in political theory, and those championing his concep-
tion of politics as a conversation (Minch, 2009; Rorty, 1980).
Other theorists remain skeptical. Quentin Skinner’s judgement expresses the
views of many – and probably the majority – in the Anglophone community of
political theory:
I am fairly confident about several points. One is that Oakeshott’s work was of no
philosophical influence at all . . . He was widely understood as an illuminating com-
mentator on Hobbes and I must say I found him virtually unreadable on that
subject . . . Oakeshott seemed a figure of the past and we rejected his anti-rationalism
and political conservatism outright . . . nothing prepared my generation for his apothe-
osis under Thatcherism, nor the high esteem in which his philosophy continues to be
widely held. (Skinner, 2002)
This antinomian reception is rooted both in perceptions of Oakeshott’s ideological
preferences and allegiances, and the distance between the nature and focus of his
own philosophical interests and the dominant trends in Anglophone political
theory from the 1ate 1970s. But it is also the product of a partial familiarity
with Oakeshott’s corpus. During his lifetime, his body of published work had a
rather slender appearance, comprising two major monographs (Oakeshott, 1933,
1975a), separated by some 40 years, and two rather more accessible collections of
essays on politics and history. His most widely read work was the first of these –
Rationalism in Politics (originally published in 1962), which included a notable
clutch of essays that he wrote in the 1940s. Their wide readership resulted in the
application of the ideological label conservative to his thinking, and this has
undoubtedly had a somewhat distorting effect upon perceptions of his intellectual
contribution.
Following his death in 1990, however, a much larger body of writings, from
different stages of his life, has become available. And, with their appearance comes
the opportunity for a more rounded and contextually meaningful appreciation of
the development and range of his thought. There are now six additional collections
of essays, reviews and lectures, all compiled and edited with care and skill by Luke
O’ Sullivan.1 In this same period, there has been a notable increase in the number
of academic treatments of different aspects of his thought.2 And this welter of
posthumous publication has done much to create the impetus for the reappraisal
of the status and import of Oakeshott’s diverse body of writing, and a reassessment
of his place in the pantheon of British political thinking.
A considerable portion of his intellectual life – including all of the ‘middle years’
between the appearance of Experience and its Modes (1933) and On Human
Conduct (1975a) – has been terra incognita for many of his interpreters. And, as
140
European Journal of Political Theory 18(1)
a result, it has been hard to grasp the relationship between the seemingly disparate
ideas set out in these different works. But with the publication of his Notebooks, we
are afforded the chance to form a nuanced and informed understanding of how the
thinking in them interconnected, and to appreciate the range of intellectual influ-
ences and political preoccupations that characterised his work. As O’Sullivan
observes, they ‘. . . open a window onto Oakeshott’s intellectual development that
simply cannot be found elsewhere in his writings . . . and make clear continuities in
his thought, such as a persistent interest in Christianity, which are much less visible
elsewhere’ (O’Sullivan 2014: vii).
Above all, these private writings offer insight into the mixture of personal, cultural
and political factors that shaped this extraordinary mind. The idiosyncratic and –
typically cryptic – jottings and thoughts contained in this volume have been culled
from an array of journals written between 1922 and 1986. These include his own
reflections on a host of philosophical issues, topical political and cultural questions
and personal preoccupations, intermingled with quotations and passages transcribed
from other writers, as well as short essays, dreamy asides and a number of heartfelt,
often narcissistic, musings on the state of his own romantic life.
The prevailing style is cryptic and, as their editor rightly notes, deliberately
aphoristic. O’Sullivan indeed contends that they should be placed within a
European ‘aphoristic tradition’ which tended to regard successful aphorisms
as ‘brief, definitive and philosophical’, and which incorporated such figures as
Pascal, the Marquis de Vauvenargues, Nietzsche and Bradley – all of who are
liberally referenced in the Notebooks.
As well as offering invaluable material for the biographer, these materials supply
important clues about some of the intellectual threads running throughout
Oakeshott’s various works, and point to a string of normative commitments
which recurred throughout his evolving thinking, several of which render him a
much harder figure to appropriate for those engaged in contemporary normative
projects than is typically appreciated. The place and persistence of these norms are
of particular importance to the study of Oakeshott’s own thought given his own
repeated insistence upon the inadmissibility of normative considerations to the
enterprise of theorising about...
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