Notes Notes for Introduction 1. Michael J. Oakeshott,“On Being Conservative,”in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (London: Methuen and Company, 1962, reprinted with addi- tions and edited by Timothy Fuller by Liberty Press, 1991), p. 434. 2. Michael A. Mosher, “The Skeptic’s Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790-1990,” Political Theory 19 (August), p. 394. 3. Ibid., p. 395. 4. Oakeshott,“Political Education,” in Rationalism in Politics, pp. 56-7, see also pp. 66-9. 5. Perry Anderson,“The Intransigent Right at the End of the Century,” Lon- don Review of Books 14 (September 24, 1992): 7-11. 6. Robert Devigne, Recasting Conservatism: Oakeshott, Strauss, and the Response to Postmodernism (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1994). 7. Paul Franco, The Political Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1990), p. 2. 8. See, for example, Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) and Chantal Mouffe, “Democ- ratic Citizenship and the Political Community,” in Dimensions of Radical Democracy: Pluralism, Citizenship and Democracy ed. Chantal Mouffe (London: Verso, 1992), pp. 225-239. 9. Jeremy Rayner, “The Legend of Oakeshott’s Conservatism: Sceptical Phi- losophy and Limited Politics,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 18 (June, 1985), pp. 313-338. 10. Oakeshott,“The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind,”in Ratio- nalism in Politics, pp. 488- 541. 11. Steven A. Gerencser,“Voices in Conversation: Philosophy and Politics in the 168 Notes Work of Michael Oakeshott,” Journal of Politics 57 (August 1995), pp. 724- 742, see especially pp. 739-741. 12. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 264. 13. Cornel West,“Afterword,” in Post-Analytic Philosophy, eds, John Rajchman and Cornel West.(New York:Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 267.West further entertains “the sinister possibility that the antiepistemological radi- calism of neo-pragmatism—much like the antimetaphysical radicalism of postmodernism—may be an emerging form of ideology in late capitalist societies which endorses the existing order while undergirding sophisti- cated antiepistemological and antimetaphysical tastes of postmodern avant- gardists.” P.269. 14. Mosher,“The Skeptic’s Burke,” p. 404. 15. Oakeshott, Morality and Politics in Modern Europe, ed. Shirley Robin Letwin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); and “Political Philosophy” in Religion, Politics and the Moral Life, ed. Timothy Fuller (New Haven:Yale, 1993), pp. 138-155. 16. Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933; also in paperback by the same publisher, 1985). 17. Oakeshott, On Human Conduct (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Claren- don Press, 1991). 18. See for instance Franco, The Political Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott, and Tariq Modood and Dale Hall, “Oakeshott and the Impossibility of Philo- sophical Politics,” Political Studies 30 (1982): 157-176. 19. Oakeshott, “The Authority of the State,” in Religion, Politics and the Moral Life, (originally published in 1929), pp. 74-90. 20. Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes, p. 341. 21. Oakeshott,“The Concept of a Philosophy of Politics” in Religion, Politics and the Moral Life, pp. 119-137. 22. Oakeshott, “Political Philosophy,” in Religion, Politics and the Moral Life, pp. 138-155. Fuller dates this essay “1946-1950.” 23. I focus in this chapter primarily upon Oakeshott’s “Thomas Hobbes,” Scrutiny 4 (1935-6), pp. 263- 277,“Introduction to Leviathan,” pp. 221-294, and “The Moral Life in the Writings of Thomas Hobbes,” pp. 295-350, in Rationalism in Politics. 24. Oakeshott,“Thomas Hobbes,” p. 277. 25. Oakeshott, On Human Conduct, p. 158. Notes for Chapter One 1. Robert Grant, Oakeshott (London:The Claridge Press, 1990), p. 13. 2. Hannah Fenichel Pitkin, “The Roots of Conservatism,” Dissent 20 (1973), p. 497, note. Notes 169 3. W. H. Greenleaf, Oakeshott’s Philosophical Politics (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1966), p. 2. 4. Ibid., pp. 2, 5. 5. Michael J. Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933; also in paperback by the same publisher, 1985), p. 6. 6. Rudolf Metz, A Hundred Years in British Philosophy, trans. J.W.Harvey,T. E. Jessop, and Henry Stuart, ed. J. H. Muirhead (London: Allen and Unwin, 1938), p. 258. 7. A. M. Quinton “Absolute Idealism,” Proceedings of The British Academy, 57 (1971), p. 305. 8. Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes, p. 6. 9. Paul Franco, The Political Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1990), p. 15. Franco discusses the positivist and neo-Kant- ian heritage of these claims in the preceding pages. 10. Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes, p. 7. 11. Greenleaf, Oakeshott’s Philosophical Politics, p. 1 and Quinton,“Absolute Ide- alism,” p. 302. Greenleaf reports that “Unkind commentators have said that Sterling, if he did posses this secret, kept it uncommonly well.” P.1. 12. Metz, A Hundred Years in British Philosophy, p. 239. 13. Ibid. A similar claim is made by Etienne Gilson, Thomas Langan and Armand Maurer: “The first diffusion of German idealism in England was largely the work of poets and essayists like Coleridge and Carlyle and not of academic professors”; but they also place the introduction of Hegel and “full metaphysical idealism” to England with Stirling. Recent Philosophy: Hegel to the Present (New York:Random House, 1962), pp. 455, 456. 14. Metz, A Hundred Years in British Philosophy, p. 249. 15. Ibid., p. 251. 16. Quinton,“Absolute Idealism,” p. 305. 17. Greenleaf, Oakeshott’s Philosophical Politics, p. 6. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., p. 7. Franco suggests that this was exclusively “what British idealism was directed against: namely, British empiricism. It was against the empiri- cist theory of knowledge.” The Political Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott, p. 18. 20. Greenleaf, in discussing idealism’s poor repute, claims,“We are told that, as philosophy, [idealism] is meaningless jargon or rhetoric, if not downright fraud.” Oakeshott’s Philosophical Politics, p. 1 21. Quinton,“Absolute Idealism,” p. 327. 22. Ibid., p. 328. 23. F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, 2nd ed., (London: Oxford University Press, 1897), p. 123. Later Bradley summarizes “There is but one Reality,and its being consists in experience. In this one whole all appearances come together....Everything is experience and experience is one.”Pp. 403, 405. 24. Quinton,“Absolute Idealism,” p. 328. 170 Notes 25. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, p. 321. 26. Ibid., 322. 27. Quinton,“Absolute Idealism,” p. 328. 28. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, p. 518. 29. Ibid., pp. 518-9. 30. Quinton,“Absolute Idealism,” p. 328. 31. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, p. 127. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid., pp. 128-9. 34. Quinton,“Absolute Idealism,” p. 328. 35. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, p. 124. 36. Ibid. 37. Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes, p. 10. 38. Ibid., p. 11. 39. Ibid., p. 48. 40. Ibid., p. 42. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid., p. 45. 43. Ibid., p. 46. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid., p. 33. 46. Ibid., p. 2. 47. This is an aspect of idealism that Quinton did not mention the thesis that within the Absolute there are divergences of one sort or another.Thus, for example, Bradley claims there are appearances distinct from, as well as part of, reality. He claims “The Absolute is each appearance, and is all, but it is not any one as such.” Appearance and Reality, p. 431. Oakeshott’s concept of “modifications” is his own variation upon this idealist thesis. 48. Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes, p. 84. 49. Ibid., p. 71. 50. Ibid., p. 2. In an essay written a few years after Experience and Its Modes, “The Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence,” Oakeshott, in a singular excep- tion, does suggest that philosophy can order other experience. He states, “[philosophical jurisprudence] will be one explanation of the nature of law in a hierarchy of explanations. It has the authority to create this hierarchy by supplying a universal criterion by which the adequacy,the relative com- pleteness of all explanations may be determined.”“The Concept of a Philo- sophical Jurisprudence,” Politica 3 (1938), p. 352. Again, however, while in Experience and Its Modes Oakeshott does see philosophical experience as a criterion, he dismisses the interest in ranking various modal explanations, because while It is, of course, true that modes of experience do not fall equally short; in the end the distinction between them is, simply, that they Notes 171 represent different degrees of abstraction. In order [then] to real- ize its purpose, in order to keep itself unencumbered by what is abstract and defective, it is not necessary for philosophy to deter- mine the exact degree of defect belonging to any presented abstract world of ideas, it is necessary only to recognize abstract and over- come it. (p. 84) 51. Experience and Its Modes, p. 4. 52. Ibid., p. 5. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid., p. 320. 55. Timothy Fuller, the editor of the volume that includes “The Concept of a Philosophy of Politics,” which was “an undated hand-written original,” chooses to date this piece “1946?”“Preface” and editor’s notes to Michael Oakeshott, Religion, Politics and the Moral Life, ed. Timothy Fuller (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1993), pp. vii, 119. It seems much more likely, however, that the essay was written by Oakeshott in the thirties, especially since Oakeshott did publish almost a quarter of it in 1938 as part of “The Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence.” For a full discussion of the dat- ing of this essay, see Chapter Three: Section IV. 56. Oakeshott,“The Concept of a Philosophy of Politics,” p. 137. 57. Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes, p. 71. 58. Ibid., p. 35. 59. Ibid., p. 3. 60. Ibid., p. 46. 61. Ibid., p. 47. 62. Ibid., p. 356. 63. Skepticism is not a manner of thought that I have entirely imposed on Oakeshott.