Michael Oakeshott (1901-1990)

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

- Alistair MacFarlane

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. When reporters asked his neighbours about him, all they learned was that he had rebuilt, with his own hands, the cottage where he lived, and that he drove a very old sports car. As for where he came from, or what he had done for a living, they had no idea.