Oakeshott’s Distinction

On Human Conduct By Michael Oakeshott Oxford, 350 pp., $18.50 Theorizing, says Michael Oakeshott, is an adventure. He enacts his own thesis. This majestic work by the greatest living British philosopher of conservative disposition is pre-eminently a grand adventure. Oakeshott is an explorer on the old-fashioned scale. He sets out alone, unmonitored by mission control; he navigates without instruments, or only with those known to his pre-electronic forebears, compass and sextant worn and weatherstained by long use. His log is free of mathematical formulae, compact, dense, sometimes hard to follow and doubling back into its tracks, yet at other times breaking free into passages of fluency and beauty. On Human Conduct offers fewer beguiling excursions than Rationalism in Politics, but in the middle of the journey there are five pages on the place of religion in human life which have a resounding grace our century rarely hears.

Like all great journeys of mind or body, Oakeshott’s odyssey leaves an impression of strangeness. To talk of novelty here is to miss the uniqueness of the enterprise. In truth there is little novel about the theme or themes upon which he embarks, any more than the sight of a ship leaving harbor comes as novel to the loungers on the jetty. That the ship is the Mayflower and that its journey will be immense and dowered with huge consequences is not easy to discern at the time. Contemporaries can only savor its strangeness and try to analyze precisely how and why it is so strange.

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Ferdinand Mount

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On Human Conduct By Michael Oakeshott Oxford, 350 pp., $18.50 Theorizing, says Michael Oakeshott, is an adventure. He enacts his own thesis. This majestic work by the greatest living British philosopher of conservative disposition is pre-eminently a grand adventure. Oakeshott is an explorer on the old-fashioned scale. He sets out alone, unmonitored by mission control; he navigates without instruments, or only with those known to his pre-electronic forebears, compass and sextant worn and weatherstained by long use. His log is free of mathematical formulae, compact, dense, sometimes hard to follow and doubling back into its tracks, yet at other times breaking free into passages of fluency and beauty. On Human Conduct offers fewer beguiling excursions than Rationalism in Politics, but in the middle of the journey there are five pages on the place of religion in human life which have a resounding grace our century rarely hears.

Like all great journeys of mind or body, Oakeshott’s odyssey leaves an impression of strangeness. To talk of novelty here is to miss the uniqueness of the enterprise. In truth there is little novel about the theme or themes upon which he embarks, any more than the sight of a ship leaving harbor comes as novel to the loungers on the jetty. That the ship is the Mayflower and that its journey will be immense and dowered with huge consequences is not easy to discern at the time. Contemporaries can only savor its strangeness and try to analyze precisely how and why it is so strange.