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Brief Lives

Michael Oakeshott (1901-1990)

Alistair MacFarlane considers the modes of life of a conservative philosopher.

Michael Oakeshott, like Ludwig Wittgenstein, is a philosopher’s philosopher. He had a unique point of view, and a coherent way of looking at life, clearly expressed in wonderfully elegant prose. Oakeshott was also utterly indifferent to fashion in academic, political and philosophical life, and pursued obscurity to a point of near public invisibility. On his death, the local pastor who was due to take his funeral service was astounded to read in his Daily Telegraph of 21st December 1990 that he was soon to bury “the greatest political philosopher in the Anglo-Saxon tradition since Mill – or even Burke.” The Guardian called him “perhaps the most original academic philosopher of this century”; and in the Independent his writing was compared to the essays of Montaigne, which would have greatly pleased him.

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