Books, Arts & Manners

On History and Other Essays, by Michael Oakeshott Barnes & Noble, 198 pp., $25.75 Fifty years ago next month, in a notice of Michael Oakeshott’s first book, R. G. Collingwood exhibited a modesty rare among reviewers. “I have tried,” he wrote, “to expound Mr. Oakeshott’s thesis rather than criticize, because it is so original, so important, and so profound that criticism must be silent until his meaning has been long pondered.”

Now we have in hand Michael Oakeshott’s latest and (he now thinks) final philosophical work, On History and Other Essays. It evinces a lineal continuity with his thesis of a half-century ago. Yet Collingwood’s caveat still holds. The essays in this book still require more exposition than criticism. Or to put it more precisely, they demand that our critical faculty be connoisseurial, that we employ it not to cavil but to discern what is distinctive and enduring.

JL

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Josiah Lee Auspitz

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On History and Other Essays, by Michael Oakeshott Barnes & Noble, 198 pp., $25.75 Fifty years ago next month, in a notice of Michael Oakeshott’s first book, R. G. Collingwood exhibited a modesty rare among reviewers. “I have tried,” he wrote, “to expound Mr. Oakeshott’s thesis rather than criticize, because it is so original, so important, and so profound that criticism must be silent until his meaning has been long pondered.”

Now we have in hand Michael Oakeshott’s latest and (he now thinks) final philosophical work, On History and Other Essays. It evinces a lineal continuity with his thesis of a half-century ago. Yet Collingwood’s caveat still holds. The essays in this book still require more exposition than criticism. Or to put it more precisely, they demand that our critical faculty be connoisseurial, that we employ it not to cavil but to discern what is distinctive and enduring.