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gator in the vasty general.” Reviewer DavidKettler bemoaned Oakeshott’s vision as“antique and irrelevant” with respect tothe manifold present crises demandingattention. And the criticisms did not stopthere. Oakeshott was an opponent of anyendeavor to gain philosophical clarityon human conduct; he was an Englishgentleman out of touch with the modernsituation; he trivialized politics, and soon. Paul Franco recounts that in 1956Irving Kristol rejected Oakeshott’s essay“On Being Conservative” for publicationin Encounter on the grounds that it wasboth “irredeemably secular” and “at oddswith the ideological, ‘creedal,’ mentalityof Americans.” These testimonies pointto an important fact about Oakeshott,namely, that many of his readers, conser-vatives and liberals alike, do not knowwhat to make of him.

If they are not actively hostile to hisideas, at least some readers recognize hisoriginality and his influence on twenti-eth-century British politics. Indeed, hisessays, “Rationalism in Politics” and “OnBeing Conservative,” often turn up inanthologies of conservative thought. Yetmany readers find him elusive. Oakeshott’stwo sustained works of philosophy—Ex-perience and its Modes (1933) and OnHuman Conduct (1975)—are difficult go-ing: the former because it borrows heavilyfrom the philosophical tradition of Brit-

ELIZABETH COREY is a lecturer in the HonorsCollege at Baylor University and author of MichaelOakeshott on Religion, Aesthetics, and Politics(University of Missouri Press, 2006).

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott,by Terry Nardin, University Park:Pennsylvania State University Press,2001. 241 pp.

In Defence of Modernity: Vision andPhilosophy in Michael Oakeshott, byEfraim Podoksik, Exeter, UK: ImprintAcademic, 2003. 268 pp.

Michael Oakeshott: An Introduction,by Paul Franco, New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 2004. 224 pp.

The Limits of Political Theory:Oakeshott’s Philosophy of CivilAssociation, by Kenneth B. McIntyre,Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, 2004.210 pp.

The Intellectual Legacy of MichaelOakeshott, edited by Corey Abel andTimothy Fuller, Exeter, UK: ImprintAcademic, 2005. 328 pp.

IN A 1963 REVIEW OF Rationalism in Politics,George Catlin remarked that MichaelOakeshott’s political theory was “aboutcontemporary with Noah, that great navi-

BOOK REVIEWS

The World of Michael OakeshottElizabeth Corey

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ish Idealism, the latter because of its pre-cise technical vocabulary, largely his origi-nal creation. Oakeshott’s essays, too, arebrilliant but difficult distillations of hisphilosophy, more compact than his booksbut no less profound. His most famouswork, Rationalism in Politics, is a collec-tion of these essays in which he addressessuch diverse topics as political economy,the moral life, the thought of Hobbes, andpoetic experience.

Besides style and subject matter, thereare a number of other reasons readersfind Oakeshott hard to grasp.To traditional conservativeshis declaration that “there isno such thing as human na-ture” seems both skepticaland provocative. Groundinghis conservatism neither inhistory nor natural law but ina disposition toward presentenjoyment, Oakeshott ap-pears to have rejected all theprinciples that undergirdAnglo-American conservative thought.To liberals, on the other hand, Oakeshott’semphasis on “traditions” and “intima-tions” over and against conscious plan-ning is seen as both archaic and frustrat-ing—even, some have argued, irrational.Oakeshott’s unwillingness to enter intodebates about how to solve present prob-lems showed that he was at a distantremove from contemporary politics, theysaid; he was yet another irrelevant aca-demic.

It is also no easy task to fit Oakeshottinto the pantheon of other notable twen-tieth-century political philosophers whomight in the broadest sense be calledconservative, thinkers such as Leo Straussand Eric Voegelin. On the one hand,Oakeshott shared much with Strauss andVoegelin: they all wanted to recover whatis valuable from the history of politicalthought. They railed against the reduc-tionistic tendencies of modern socialscience. And they were all, in different

ways, quite critical of much they sawaround them in modern life and scholar-ship. But Oakeshott, more than eitherStrauss or Voegelin, was at the same timea defender of modernity, as EfraimPodoksik argues so convincingly in hisnew book. How could Oakeshott havebeen at once a critic and defender ofmodern politics? I shall have more to sayabout this below.

Of course, Oakeshott has always hadhis loyal defenders, and their numbershave grown in recent years. 2001 marked

the first meeting of theMichael Oakeshott Associa-tion, a group that meets inalternate years to present pa-pers and to discussOakeshott’s thought. Theorganization’s members hailprimarily from Britain and theUnited States, but there arerepresentatives from othercountries as well, includingAustralia, Israel, South Africa

and China. The last several years havealso seen the creation of a monographseries on Oakeshott by the British press,Imprint Academic. This series has addedsignificantly to the literature, since priorto 2001 there were only a handful of ex-tended studies of Oakeshott’s thought.

Paul Franco’s 1990 book, The PoliticalPhilosophy of Michael Oakeshott, has longbeen the basic starting point for the seri-ous student, but the other book-lengthtreatments of Oakeshott, prior to the newImprint series, were W.H. Greenleaf’s mono-graph, Oakeshott’s Philosophical Politics(1966), Robert Grant’s short intellectualbiography, Oakeshott (1990), Wendell JohnCoats’s Oakeshott and his Contemporaries(2000) and Steven Gerencser’s The Sceptic’sOakeshott (2000). The journal literatureon Oakeshott, however, is quite a bit moreextensive. The “official” bibliography,which can be found on the MichaelOakeshott Association website, runs wellover forty pages.

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try to expound Oakeshott’s thought asclearly as possible and to highlight whatis distinctive about his philosophy. Suchwas the approach of Paul Franco’s firstbook, and such is the approach—writtenfor a more general audience—of his sec-ond, Michael Oakeshott: An Introduction.Terry Nardin’s The Philosophy of MichaelOakeshott is also in this genre, althoughNardin is concerned not so much with thespecifically political implications ofOakeshott’s philosophy as he is with histheory of knowledge and his distinctiveapproach to the study of history. Ken-neth McIntyre’s The Limits of PoliticalTheory: Oakeshott’s Philosophy of CivilAssociation rounds out this group, argu-ing that Oakeshott’s philosophy cannotbe assimilated into familiar categories(liberal, conservative, communitarian)but is strikingly original.

The other current approach toOakeshott is what might be called “con-text and comparison.” Authors such asEfraim Podoksik (In Defence of Modernity:Vision and Philosophy in Michael Oakeshott)and Debra Candreva (The Enemies of Per-fection: Oakeshott, Plato and the Critique ofRationalism [2004], not reviewed here)make the convincing case that to under-stand an author one must understand hisinterlocutors. And so these works attemptto place Oakeshott in his intellectual con-text and to identify the philosophers withwhom Oakeshott is engaged in conversa-tion. The first book of this kind was JohnCoats’s Oakeshott and his Contemporaries.Among the “contemporaries” are St. Au-gustine, Hegel, and Montaigne. The Intel-lectual Legacy of Michael Oakeshott, ed-ited by Corey Abel and Timothy Fuller,furthers this project by collecting essaysthat compare Oakeshott to other impor-tant thinkers. Both of these approaches—what for the sake of convenience may betermed illumination and comparison, re-spectively—bear fruit in the hands ofOakeshott’s best interpreters. And nei-ther approach, of course, does wholly

And yet it is not exactly fitting to por-tray his reception among readers as abattle between attackers and defenders,although he has many of both. ForOakeshott himself rejected simplistic,ideological approaches to complex prob-lems and indeed, to complex philoso-phers, like Hobbes. Philosophizing, in hisview, was the engagement to be continu-ally (and endlessly) en voyage, never torest satisfied with received wisdom orfacile political distinctions. And so to be“for” or “against” a philosophy is funda-mentally to misunderstand the philo-sophical disposition, which must alwaysbe open to argument or persuasion or, touse one of Oakeshott’s favorite meta-phors, to the unexpected insights thatmay result from conversation.

On the other hand, political activity(as opposed to philosophy) “involvesmental vulgarity…because of the falsesimplification of human life implied ineven the best of its purposes.” AndOakeshott was surely an unusual politi-cal philosopher in his insistence on poli-tics as a distinctly second-order activity.This is not, however, to say that he foundpolitics unimportant. The most valuablehuman activities, in his view, dependedupon political arrangements that ensuredboth security and freedom. Nevertheless,political activity itself requires an immer-sion in practical, everyday affairs and theability to manage constantly recurringcrises of all sorts. It is thus at a distantremove from the leisure required for the“playful” pursuits Oakeshott valued mosthighly, such as philosophy, art, poetryand liberal learning.

The books considered in this reviewfall broadly into two categories, whichmirror the general approach to Oakeshottstudies at present. First, there are bookswhose authors are primarily concernedwith setting out Oakeshott’s thought as itappears in his major published works.These authors are not so much concernedwith critique or comparison, but rather

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without the other. One cannot fully un-derstand Oakeshott on his own terms, forinstance, without recognizing his markeddebts to Hobbes and to Hegel. Neverthe-less, it is a useful way of categorizing whatmight otherwise be seen as a welter ofnew and, for the most part, quite interest-ing scholarship.

Perhaps the best way to approachOakeshott is to consider the sort of hu-man character he valued. In an essay pub-lished posthumously in 2004, “The Voiceof Conversation in the Education of Man-kind,” Oakeshott described this charac-ter—an apt description, so I am told, ofthe man himself. Such a person “will havean amused tolerance of himself; he will beskeptical about his own opinions; he willnot take himself seriously, but he will beinterested in what he finds himself to be;he will accept without dismay, but alsowithout approval, his own want of greaterperfection.” This is not a prophet thun-dering from the mountaintops but some-one who embraces the Augustinian in-sight that mundane perfection is impos-sible. At the heart of Oakeshott’s philoso-phy is a graceful acceptance of the humancondition and a rejection of all gnosticand “Rationalist” enterprises.

Paul Franco has an intuitive under-standing of this character, and he pro-vides a lucid description of it in MichaelOakeshott: An Introduction. In his first chap-ter he observes that Oakeshott was “skep-tical without being cynical, ironic with-out being nihilistic, modest without be-ing timid, learned without being encyclo-pedic, and serious without being solemn.”His was “a supremely civilized voice.” Thefollowing chapters of Franco’s book ad-dress the most important aspects ofOakeshott’s thought: his debts to BritishIdealist philosophy, his conception ofpolitical philosophy, Rationalism, themetaphor of conversation, and the ideaof politics as civil association. Each ofthese chapters is beautifully written andaccessible to the non-specialist, though

it is not exactly light reading. And this isbecause Oakeshott himself is never lightreading. Even when he was at his mostpolemical, as in the title essay of Rational-ism in Politics, his political reflection wasfounded on the philosophical visionelaborated in his early Experience and itsModes (1933).

Although Franco does a superb job ofexplaining what Oakeshott does in Expe-rience and its Modes, it is Terry Nardin whopresents the most complete account ofOakeshott’s modal theory. Nardin, likeFranco, is a beautiful stylist, and this makesup for the inherent difficulty of his mate-rial. The importance of Nardin’s The Phi-losophy of Michael Oakeshott lies in itsattempt to situate Oakeshott’s politicalphilosophy within the context of his largerphilosophical view, a view that can onlybe expounded by beginning with themodes of experience. It is therefore worthpausing to consider that theory on itsown terms.

In Experience and its Modes Oakeshottelaborates three “modes” or “arrests” inexperience: history, science and practice.These modes should not be understoodas “parts” of experience, for Oakeshottnever said that there is a certain type ofexperience that may be understood asexclusively practical or exclusively scien-tific. Rather, modes represent ways oflooking at the whole, in which that wholeis seen from a limited perspective. AsNardin explains it, a mode designates away of thinking or being “that [is] coher-ent, comprehensive, and independent.”Thus practice views the whole of experi-ence from the point of view of what sortsof personal satisfactions it can provide. Itis concerned with desire and aversion aswell as moral approval and disapproval.Science views the world in terms of itsquantifiable character. In a famous ex-ample, there is no “water” for the scien-tist; there is only H2O. And history orientsitself sub specie praeteritum, that is, ac-cording to a conception of the past. Phi-

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losophy is not a mode, but a parasiticactivity that emerges to examine the pos-tulates and the presuppositions of eachmode.

Because of the modal separation ofthese worlds of experience, science (forinstance) should not attempt to dictateto practice, as it does when it is claimedthat human conduct is determined orpredicted by genes or by chemicals in thebrain. Conduct is never, according toOakeshott, merely the result of “a genetic,a psychological, or a so-called ‘social’process” nor can it be “forecasted” bypseudo-scientific models. Likewise prac-tice ought not corrupt history for its ownends, even though it almost always does.George Santayana’s oft-quoted line—“Those who fail to understand history arecondemned to repeat it”—is, in Oake-shott’s terms, a misunderstanding. His-tory exists, he asserts, not to inform thepresent and provide practical guidance;it is a subject of study in its own right.Each mode is sovereign in its own realmand philosophy stands apart from themall.

Not surprisingly, this modal separa-tion also lies behind Oakeshott’s unusualconception of a non-prescriptive philoso-phy. If philosophy’s role is merely to standback as an impartial spectator and toexamine the “goings-on” in the world, itcannot make normative statements aboutman’s ultimate ends. Philosophy is onlyexplanatory. This view, of course, distin-guished Oakeshott from most of his con-temporaries, and indeed from mostphilosophers generally, for whomphilosophy’s normative implications areof primary importance. And in truth, thereare certain normative implications thatemerge even from Oakeshott’s philoso-phy: individualism is better than collec-tivism, he believed, and true freedom isfostered by a state that allows “civil asso-ciation” within the rule of law.

Yet the importance of this separationof modes is that it preserves certain realms

of pure and uniquely human activity. ForOakeshott, praxis is not some sort of un-differentiated, primary experience, butone mode among others. As dominant asit is in the lives of most human beings,practice may at times recede into thebackground, allowing other modes theirrightful places. Poetry (by whichOakeshott means all artistic activity) isone such mode, quite different from prac-tice, in which one is invited to “contem-plate” and “delight” with no thought ofconsequences or of the future. Likewise,the study of history or any subject ofliberal learning may be approached en-tirely for its own sake, with no regard forits practical application. Thus there aretimes when the world’s persistent ques-tion “Of what use is this to us?” can hap-pily be ignored.

Kenneth McIntyre takes up the ques-tion of how to classify Oakeshott’s un-usual view of political philosophy in TheLimits of Political Theory: Oakeshott’s Phi-losophy of Civil Association. He argues,correctly, that Oakeshott’s philosophy is“a challenge, a provocation, to all of thecurrently dominant schools of politicaltheory and political practice.” He pointsout that the labels used to categorizetheorists are a very imperfect fit when itcomes to Oakeshott, who was neitherexactly a liberal nor exactly a conserva-tive. Like Franco and Nardin, McIntyrerecognizes the degree to which the modesof experience are an essential part ofOakeshott’s thought, and thus his firstsubstantive chapter focuses on modal-ity. Taken as a whole, McIntyre’s thesis isright on target. He aims, on the one hand,to explain that there is an underlyingcontinuity throughout Oakeshott’s cor-pus (contra Steven Gerencser and LukeO’Sullivan) and, on the other, to show thedistinctiveness of Oakeshott’s “non-pre-scriptive” theorizing.

Unlike Nardin and Franco, McIntyre isconcerned not so much with the whole ofOakeshott’s philosophy as with its spe-

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cifically political implications, and hisdiscussion of Oakeshott’s limited notionof political activity and of the state as anon-purposive “civil association” is illu-minating. His book should be read, how-ever, alongside Franco’s, becauseMcIntyre’s focus on the political meansthat he must necessarily downplay otheraspects of Oakeshott’s thought: the po-etry lurking in his prose, the dry humor ofa master essayist, and the profound re-flections on the human condition thatappear in his two essays entitled, “TheTower of Babel” and elsewhere.

For a broad and eclectic approach toOakeshott’s work, it is well worth perus-ing Abel and Fuller’s edited volume ofessays entitled The Intellectual Legacy ofMichael Oakeshott. The topics of theseessays range widely, from the thinkerswho influenced Oakeshott’s intellectualdevelopment to the implications of histhought for current politics. This volumeis part of the effort to contextualizeOakeshott, and thus it falls into the cat-egory I have designated “comparison.”Several younger scholars—DebraCandreva, Eric Kos and Corey Abel—be-gin the work by examining Oakeshott’sdebt to Plato and Aristotle.

Although Oakeshott did not writemuch that explicitly considers the an-cients, he read them exhaustively as ayoung man, and his notebook on Plato’sRepublic is (as Eric Kos has pointed out)full of insight and information that willinterest the Oakeshott scholar. DebraCandreva observes that Plato’s dialecti-cal method was a significant part of theinspiration for Oakeshott’s famous imageof philosophy as conversation. And CoreyAbel traces the Aristotelian themes thatappear throughout Oakeshott’s corpus,particularly in his early work.

The next section of this book consid-ers Oakeshott and modernity: his rela-tionship to such thinkers as Hegel andSpinoza and his ideas about representa-tive democracy and the rule of law. Here,

Josiah Lee Auspitz and Doug Den Uyl,among others, take up the difficult philo-sophical issues having to do withOakeshott’s conception of modality andhis debts to Hobbes and Spinoza. Thebook’s third section considers varioustopics under the heading of “OakeshottToday.” There is a splendid short essay byOakeshott’s colleague at the LondonSchool of Economics, Kenneth Minogue,whose masterful style always makes diffi-cult philosophy delightful for his readers.And the book concludes with three con-siderations of Oakeshott’s views on po-etry and aesthetic experience. These top-ics might at first appear to be peripheral,but they actually lie at the very heart ofhis approach to human experience, as Ishall discuss below.

One other volume is worth mentioningas part of the “context and comparison”approach to Oakeshott. Efraim Podoksik’sIn Defence of Modernity attempts to showhow Oakeshott embraced the opportuni-ties offered by modernity, a situationconsisting of “inescapable fragmentation”and “irreducible plurality” of the spheresof life. Oakeshott saw this modern frag-mentation not as something to bemourned but celebrated, because it pro-vided opportunities for self-determina-tion and what Oakeshott elsewhere calledthe “morality of the individual.” And yet,as Podoksik recognizes, Oakeshott alsosaw that much modern philosophy hasissued in un-free and anti-individualisticregimes that are inescapably “Rational-ist.”

A virtue of Podoksik’s book is his abil-ity to situate Oakeshott between thosehe calls “pre-modernists” (such asVoegelin and Strauss) and post-modern-ists (such as Lyotard and Rorty). I havealready observed Oakeshott’s common-alities with Strauss and Voegelin, butunlike them Oakeshott did not desire, inPodoksik’s words, a return to a pre-mod-ernist “hierarchical system of values” or“some form of primordial certainty.”

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Oakeshott would appear to have still lessin common with Alasdair MacIntyre, forwhom the theme of “return” is even morepronounced. Podoksik’s book as a wholeis among the best of the new ImprintAcademic series, supplemented by copi-ous references to the unpublished mate-rial in the Oakeshott archives at the Lon-don School of Economics.

So what can we make of this literatureas a whole? First, it is obvious testimonyto an ever-increasing interest inOakeshott. Timothy Fuller, editor of the1991 LibertyPress edition of Rationalismin Politics and one of Oakeshott’s fore-most interpreters, remarked several yearsago that the formation of the MichaelOakeshott Association would surely fos-ter a cottage industry in works aboutOakeshott, and so it has. Robert Grant, aprofessor at the University of Glasgow, iscurrently writing the official biography ofOakeshott, and the number of new booksfrom Imprint Academic continues to in-crease. If Oakeshott was ever ignored, heis no longer.

But more importantly, these new vol-umes increasingly recognize the depthand breadth of Oakeshott’s thought, por-traying him not just as a philosopher ofpolitics but as a philosopher in the clas-sic tradition. Oakeshott was not one ofthe breed of modern political philoso-phers concerned with a kind of sterile“democratic theory” or a study of institu-tions—important though these may be.He was someone concerned, first and fore-most, with precisely what it means to bea human being. “I desired to know,” hewrote in 1924, “what I ought to thinkabout our life as human beings in soci-ety.” The man who knows himself bestholds “a position of great advantage inany attempt at the discovery of the truthabout the universe.” This was Oakeshott’sstarting point: he did not jump headlonginto studies of constitutions and parlia-ments, but rather began by consideringthe character of human experience, which

had for him a markedly religious and po-etic character.

The young Oakeshott is steeped in thewritings of Walter Pater, Santayana andBergson; he read Wordsworth, Housman,Shelley, Augustine, and Plotinus. He de-sired a life that was “an end in itself,” notone that sacrificed the present to an ever-receding future. To live fully in the presentand to enjoy what one has without anirritable search for more and better: thisis the foundation of Oakeshott’s conser-vatism.

As several of the authors I have re-viewed in this essay observe, and as An-drew Sullivan argues in a forthcomingbook from Imprint, one of Oakeshott’smost abiding interests was the tyranny ofthe practical mode. Practice is the realmin which human beings spend most oftheir lives, but it is ultimately unsatisfy-ing since it is, in Hobbes’s famous locu-tion, the endless search for “power afterpower.” Oakeshott’s work, however, is acontinual protest against the modern callfor all activities and relationships to beput in the service of work, progress andproductivity. His expression of man’s“playful” character recalls other thinkers,such as Josef Pieper and Johan Huizinga,who recognized the vital importance ofleisure as a means of facilitating contem-plation and what might be called the “lifeof the spirit.”

Oakeshott most appreciated thoseactivities that may be engaged in for theirown sake with little or no regard for whatwill follow. Like George Santayana,Oakeshott sometimes appeared to envythe skylark, the acrobatic flyer seen spend-ing his whole strength “on somethingultimate and utterly useless, a momen-tary entrancing pleasure which (beinguseless and ultimate) is very like an act ofworship or of sacrifice.”

At the core of Oakeshott’s philosophi-cal outlook was an appreciation of theirreducible complexity of human life, ofthe diverse ends that human beings might

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choose, and a love for uniquely humanactivities such as philosophy, poetry,conversation, and friendship. What wasunique about Oakeshott was his decid-edly equivocal attitude toward the politi-cal, despite the fact that he is most fa-mous for his works about politics. Andthough most readers know Oakeshottsolely as a political philosopher, he oughtalso to be considered an important phi-losopher simpliciter as well as a teacherand theorist of education. His collectionof essays entitled The Voice of LiberalLearning is a brilliant description of whatit means to acquire a liberal education. Itshould be read by anyone who has aninterest in the modern university.

In short, what has emerged in the yearssince Oakeshott’s death in 1990 is a muchfuller picture of the man himself and of hisphilosophy. It is no longer possible, giventhe copious early writings that are nowavailable, to dismiss Oakeshott as merelyan ideological defender of the Tory partyor an English gentleman out of touch withreality. All the books reviewed here con-tribute to this reevaluation of Oakeshottas a serious philosopher who was con-cerned with the permanent things. Toread Oakeshott is to enter into a worldinformed by art, poetry, literature, phi-losophy and by no little reflection onreligion and the transitory nature of hu-man life. Oakeshott never forgot that oneought to “use and to enjoy what is avail-able” instead of “looking for somethingelse.” The essence of conservatism forOakeshott was to “delight in what ispresent rather than what was or what maybe.” If only we could all remember this,and live according to it.

PETER AUGUSTINE LAWLER is Dana Professor ofGovernment at Berry College and author, mostrecently, of Stuck With Virtue (ISI Books, 2005).

Our Friend Mr. Darwin?Peter Augustine Lawler

Darwinian Conservatism, by LarryArnhart, Exeter, UK: Imprint Aca-demic, 2005. 156 pp.

DARWINIAN CONSERVATIVES, such as LarryArnhart, hold that it’s inevitable and goodthat we’re stuck with our natures. We are,for example, inescapably “sexual ani-mals.” We can’t help having identitiesformed by being either male or female,and the sex we have been given by nature(as opposed to the gender that has beingconstructed for us by society) determinesin large measure the choices we makethat organize our lives. It’s not true, de-spite what some feminists say, that in agender-neutral society we would free tobe androgynous beings—or take on maleor female characteristics at will.

Our freedom is not that of “disembod-ied spirits.” The limited but real freedomwe enjoy as rational animals is for delibera-tion about how best to satisfy the desiresand the inclinations we have as male andfemale animals of a certain kind. Accordingto nature, the good is the desirable or whatmakes us happy, and our moral dignityconsists in choosing to do good or whatnature intends and being happy as aresult. The Kantian choice between beinggood and being happy depends on under-standing ourselves as dignified humansonly to the extent that we can free our-selves from natural determination.

Conservatives usually object to the