Michael Joseph Oakeshott
The twentieth century produced a number of British thinkers who sought to interrogate the foundations of political life and historical understanding, working within a tradition that prized careful reasoning over ideological prescription. Michael Oakeshott was one such figure, born on 11 December 1901 in Chelsfield and educated at St George's School before going on to study at Gonville and Caius College.
Oakeshott worked as a philosopher, historian, political scientist, writer, and university teacher, conducting his inquiries in English throughout a career that extended across most of the century. His roles as both a historian and a philosopher gave his work a distinctive double orientation, drawing on the concerns of each discipline to examine questions that neither fully claimed on its own. As a university teacher, he engaged successive generations of students with the problems that occupied him as a thinker and writer, sustaining a presence in academic life that ran from the early decades of the century through to his later years.
Oakeshott received recognition from the scholarly community in two notable forms. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy, an honour awarded to individuals who have demonstrated sustained distinction in the humanities and social sciences. He also received the Benjamin E. Lippincott Award, a prize given by the American Political Science Association for a work of exceptional quality in political theory. Oakeshott died on 19 December 1990 in Acton, having lived to see his contributions acknowledged by learned bodies on both sides of the Atlantic. These honours stand as a concrete measure of the esteem in which his peers held his work as a philosopher and political scientist.
Quotes by Michael Joseph Oakeshott
For most people, political activity is a secondary activity – that is to say, they have something else to do beside attending to these arrangements. But the activity is one which every member of the group who is not a child nor a lunatic has some part and some responsibility.
It is difficult to thinkof any circumstances where learning may be said to be impossible.
Political action involves mental vulgarity, not merely because it entails the occurrence and support of those who are mentally vulgar, but because of the simplification of human life implied in even the best of it purposes.
Our predicament is not the difficulty of attaining happiness, but the difficult of avoiding the misery to which the pursuit of happiness exposes us.
Poetry is a sort of truancy, a dream within the dream of life, a wild flower planted among our wheat.
Economics is not an attempt to generalize human desires or human behavior; but to generalize the phenomena of price.
Every human being is born an heir to an inheritance to which he can succeed only in a process of learning.