Michael Oakeshott Selected Writings Collection

A collection of 6 volumes of Oakeshott's work: Notebooks, 1922-86, Early Political Writings 1925-30, The Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence, Vocabulary of a Modern European State, Lectures in the History of Political Thought, and What is History?

A collection of 6 volumes of Oakeshott's work: Notebooks, 1922-86, Early Political Writings 1925-30, The Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence, Vocabulary of a Modern European State, Lectures in the History of Political Thought, and What is History?.

From the late fifteenth century onwards, scholars across Europe began to write books about how to read and evaluate histories. These pioneering works grew from complex early modern debates about law, religion and classical scholarship. Anthony Grafton's book is based on his Trevelyan Lectures of 2005, and it proves to be a powerful and imaginative exploration of some central themes in the history of European ideas. Grafton explains why so many of these works were written, why they attained so much insight – and why, in the centuries that followed, most scholars gradually forgot that they had existed. Elegant and accessible, What Was History? is a deliberate evocation of E. H. Carr's celebrated Trevelyan Lectures, What Is History?.

From the 1920s to the 1980s Oakeshott filled dozens of notebooks with his private reflections, both personal and intellectual. Their contents range from aphorisms to miniature essays, forming a unique record of his intellectual trajectory over his entire career. This volume makes them accessible in print for the first time, drawing together a host of his previously inaccessible observations on politics, philosophy, art, education, and much else besides. Religion in particular emerges as an ongoing concern for him in a way that is not visible from his published works. The notebooks also provide a unique source of insight into Oakeshott's musings on life, thanks to the hitherto unsuspected existence of the series of 'Belle Dame' notebooks that were written in the late 1920s and early 1930s but which only came to light two decades after his death. At the same period in which he was developing the concepts that would form Experience and its Modes, Oakeshott's personal life lead him to reflect extensively on love and death, themes that highlight his enduring romantic affinities. Accompanied by an original editorial introduction, the volume allows readers to see for themselves exactly which works Oakeshott used in compiling each of his notebooks, providing a much clearer record of his intellectual influences than has previously been available. It will be an essential addition to the library of his works for all those interested in his ideas.

Oakeshott's memorable lectures on the history of political thought, delivered each year at the London School of Economics, will now be available in print for the first time as Volume II of his Selected Writings. Based on manuscripts in the LSE archive for 1966–67, the last year of Oakeshott's tenure as Professor of Political Science, these thirty lectures deal with Greek, Roman, mediaeval, and modern European political thought in a uniquely accessible manner. Scholars familiar with Oakeshott’s work will recognize his own ideas subtly blended with an exposition carefully crafted for an undergraduate audience; those discovering Oakeshott for the first time will find an account of the subject that remains illuminating and provocative.

Michael Oakeshott, the foremost British political philosopher of the twentieth century, died in 1990, leaving a substantial collection of unpublished material. Yale University Press is continuing to make available the best of these illuminating works. In this polished and hitherto unknown work, Oakeshott argues that modern politics was constituted out of a debate, persistent through centuries of European political experience down to our own day, over the question "What should governments do?" According to Oakeshott, two different answers have dominated our thought since the fifteenth century. One, exemplified by such thinkers as Rousseau and Marx, expresses a belief in the capacity of human beings to control, design, and monitor all aspects of social and political life, a belief fostered by the intoxicating increase in power available to governments in modern times. On the other hand, sceptics such as Montaigne, Pascal, and Hobbes argued that governments cannot, in principle, produce perfection and that we should prevent concentrations of power that may result in tyrannies that oppress the dignity of the human spirit. Oakeshott exposes the pitfalls of both positions and shows the value of a middle ground that incorporates scepticism with enough faith to avoid total quietism. Readers of Oakeshott will find here the thinking that lies behind his famous definition of politics as "the pursuit of intimations.".

The Poetic Character of Human Activity is a collection of essays by two Oakeshott scholars, most of which explores the meaning of Oakeshott’s pregnant phrase, “the poetic character of human activity” by comparing and contrasting this idea with similar and opposing ones, in particular those of the Taoist thinker, Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu), and his Western interpreter, A.C. Graham. Oakeshott’s deep appreciation of the poetic and non-instrumental character of human activity led him to develop an interest in the works of Zhuangzi and Confucius. Comparison of shared themes between Oakeshott and these two Chinese thinkers facilitates appreciation of his elegant analytic style and his resort to use of metaphors and story-telling when conveying some of his most profound insights. The collection also contains essays contrasting Oakeshott’s idea of the “creative” in human experience with views of, among others, Plato, Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin. Oakeshott used the phrase “the poetic character of human activity” (arguably the animating center of his entire thought), to refer to the “creative” character of human experiential reality, that is, to the fact that the form (the how) and content (the what) of all human experience and activity arise simultaneously and fluidly, and can be separated only at the expense of theoretical coherence and practical skill. The various essays in this collection explore the meaning of this claim, and its ramifications for the proper role of critical intellect in especially philosophy, morality, learning, and governance. There is also some brief contrast of Oakeshott with John Rawls, Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and Quentin Skinner.

This book is Michael Oakeshott's discussion of the relationships between the most important perspectives from which we experience the world.