The English philosopher Michael Oakeshott grew up amid the ferment of British progressivism. Born in 1901, he was the son of a civil servant and Fabian Society member. His sister married Gilbert Slater, a social reformer. His aunt, Grace Oakeshott, was a women’s rights activist who famously faked her own death to abscond with a lover to New Zealand. Oakeshott read history at Cambridge, taking political science options, before studying theology and German literature. By the 1930s, he had developed a distaste for political theories that proposed to remake the world from supposedly rational assumptions or in the mode of science, concluding that “the imposition of a universal plan of life on a society is at once stupid and immoral.” This conviction runs like a spine through his challenging early philosophical book, Experience and Its Modes, which he published at age 31.
After the war, he turned to essays more directly critical of the United Kingdom’s political drift, though nobody would have mistaken him for a partisan. “I am a member of no political party. I vote — if I have to vote — for the party which is likely to do the least harm. To that extent, I am a Tory,” he is reported by his biographer to have said. Oakeshott’s essays are elegant and elegiac. He was known for prose at once ornamental and precise, rich with allusion yet accessible. His 1956 essay “On Being Conservative” defines conservatism itself as a grateful disposition toward one’s inheritance and circumstances rather than as a political program. It reads like Solomon translated by Victorians:
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