Taking the world as it is

Michael Oakeshott’s philosophy fits no ideological or party label – but there is no better case for conservatism

I met him only once. He lived at the end of his days in a tiny slate cottage near Langton Matravers on the Dorset coast. On a damp November day, he came to greet me at the gate to his small garden, made me a small lunch of cold meat, and then sat me down in front of a coal fire to talk. I was in awe; he seemed thrilled to have a Harvard doctoral student examining every word he had ever published. And at the time, in November 1989, his delight was understandable. Mine was only the second doctoral dissertation written about him, after he had spent six decades producing some of the finest philosophical writing of the 20th century. His writing had been marginalised by the academic establishment, relentlessly pummelled by the left, and ignored by most of those in the middle because he was always described as a ‘conservative political philosopher’, about as repellent a soubriquet as one could come up with in the upper regions of Anglo-American political science. John Rawls? A demigod. Michael Oakeshott? Who?

Two decades later, after the publication of whole swathes of previously private work, Oakeshott, who died 20 years ago this month, is widely considered an intellectual force. Dozens of dissertations, collected essays, posthumous publications and even a regular conference on his work have made Oakeshott studies the kind of hot topic Oakeshott would have been utterly immune to. He was and is sui generis. Many have tried to place him in the canon of 20th-century thought, and many have failed. Each label attached fell away, to reveal the mischievous, deeply learned, funny, profound, impenetrable and elegant genius beneath.