Abstract

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. Requires signed TDF. ;As a writer on politics, Michael Oakeshott is best known for a critique of Rationalism developed in a series of essays in the early post-war years, and made available to a wide public in the 1962 collection, Rationalism in Politics. On one view, the anti-Rationalism essays are polemical critiques of contemporary plans and planners. On another, they revise the framework of ideas established in Experience and Its Modes in 1933, and extend it to the political sphere. The latter view is more interesting to the theorist; exploration of it is one concern of this thesis. It involves consideration of the relation of theory to conduct, of the characters of different forms of intellectual engagement, and of the nature of rational conduct. ;In subsequent writings on politics, particularly On Human Conduct , Oakeshott also constructs a precise civil philosophy and contributes to a debate about civil association which counts Hobbes and Hegel among its leading participants. On the basis of a developed view of modern man, first established in Experience and Its Modes and continually subject to reconsideration ever since, Oakeshott elaborates a civil philosophy in which this man is accommodated in the commonwealth. A second concern of the thesis is, then, Oakeshott's discussion of the form of human association, commonly known as 'the rule of law', in which the modern European individual finds a satisfactory home. ;The two themes are distinct, but they are not completely divorced. The first traces Oakeshott's ideas from initial contributions to British idealism through successive revisions to a point at which they constitute a considered and vertebrate philosophy. The second examines his detailed conception of commonwealth constructed on the basis of his earlier investigation of man. As a whole, Oakeshott's writings form a sustained and substantial consideration of modern European individuality, and in this context they are assessed