Michael Oakeshott

Michael Oakeshott was an English political philosopher who taught at Cambridge and then held the chair of political science at the London School of Economics from 1951 to 1969. He is often counted among the most important conservative thinkers of the twentieth century, though his conservatism was a disposition rather than a programme. In Rationalism in Politics he criticised the belief that politics can be run from abstract plans and techniques, ignoring the practical knowledge carried in traditions and habits of conduct.

Key ideas

• Rationalism in politics wrongly treats technical, book-learned knowledge as the only real knowledge.
• Practical knowledge is learned through practice and cannot be fully written down as rules.
• Politics is best understood as attending to the 'intimations' of an existing tradition of behaviour.
• To be conservative is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, the actual to the possible.
• A civil association is held together by shared rules, not by a common purpose imposed on all its members.

Major works

• Rationalism in Politics (1962)
• Experience and Its Modes (1933)
• On Human Conduct (1975)
• On History and Other Essays (1983)
• The Voice of Liberal Learning (1989)

In the Book corner

• Rationalism in Politics 1962; expanded edition 1991 · Intermediate
  A collection of essays by the English political philosopher Michael Oakeshott, first published in 1962 and expanded in 1991. The title essay…

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