Why don’t we have statues of Michael Oakeshott?

Who or what was Michael Oakeshott? How many of our fellow citizens — how many even of the readers of this journal — could confidently answer the question? I guess, not many.

One of the paradoxes of Britain’s intellectual history is that a country which, alongside the Greeks and the Germans, has contributed more than any other to
philosophical inquiry is extraordinarily uninterested in its own philosophers. A million people are said to have crowded the streets of Paris to see the funeral procession of Jean-Paul Sartre. In Scandanavia, Kierkegaard is a household name. In Germany, Heidegger is as well known as Thomas Mann. But in Britain no one has heard of Oakeshott — a philosopher who ranks with Sartre, Kierkegaard and Heidegger.

Like Wittgenstein, his even more intellectually powerful near-contemporary in Cambridge, Oakeshott’s idiosyncratic style matches an idiosyncratic (and truly interesting) cast of mind. His distinctive contribution came in two related insights — one in epistemology, the other in political theory.

In epistemology, he disdained dry inquiry into sense-data, truth-conditions and the rest of the usual apparatus of modern analytical philosophy, and concentrated instead on the ways in which knowledge is actually acquired — through history, science, poetry, practical wisdom and so forth. He argued that each of these points of view constitutes an ‘arrest’ from which the infinite, kaleidoscopic continuum of the universe can be seen in a partial way. It follows that none of these ‘modes of experience’ is intrinsically truer or less true than the others — and that truth is therefore a characteristic which can attach only to an utterance within a specific mode of thought.

Likewise, in political theory, he disdained the usual dry discussion of rights and duties, and asked instead what characteristics are required by the modern state if it is to enable people to live in liberty together.