Oakeshott Michael (1900–91), British philosopher and political theorist trained at Cambridge and in Germany. He taught first at Cambridge and Oxford; from 1951 he was professor of political science at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His works include Experience and Its Modes (1933), Rationalism in Politics (1962), On Human Conduct (1975), and On History (1983).
Oakeshott’s misleading general reputation, based on Rationalism in Politics, is as a conservative political thinker. Experience and Its Modes is a systematic work in the tradition of Hegel. Human experience is exclusively of a world of ideas intelligible insofar as it is coherent. This world divides into modes (historical, scientific, practical, and poetic experience), each being partly coherent and categorially distinct from all others. Philosophy is the never entirely successful attempt to articulate the coherence of the world of ideas and the place of modally specific experience within that whole.
His later works examine the postulates of historical and practical experience, particularly those of religion, morality, and politics. All conduct in the practical mode postulates freedom and is an ‘exhibition of intelligence’ by agents who appropriate inherited languages and ideas to the generic activity of self-enactment. Some conduct pursues specific purposes and occurs in ‘enterprise associations’ identified by goals shared among those who participate in them. The most estimable forms of conduct, exemplified by ‘conversation,’ have no such purpose and occur in ‘civil societies’ under the purely ‘adverbial’ considerations of morality and law. ‘Rationalists’ illicitly use philosophy to dictate to practical experience and subordinate human conduct to some master purpose. Oakeshott’s distinctive achievement is to have melded holistic idealism with a morality and politics radical in their affirmation of individuality.
See also POLITICAL THEORY. R.E.F.