9 - Michael Oakeshott: the philosophical skeptic in an impatient age

Summary

Michael Oakeshott was born on December 11, 1901, in Kent, England, and died December 19, 1990, at his cottage in the village of Acton on the Dorset coast. He distinguished himself as an undergraduate at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, and then as a fellow of the college and lecturer in history. From the 1920s he remained at Cambridge, except for service in the British army in World War II, until the late 1940s. Thereafter he spent a brief period in Oxford before appointment as professor of political science at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in 1951. There he taught in and convened the Government Department, introducing the MSc in the History of Political Thought. This one-year degree program attracted students from many parts of the world, especially Canada and the United States. Although he officially retired in 1968, Oakeshott continued to participate in the fall term of the program, presenting papers in its general seminar until 1980.

Oakeshott was an extraordinary teacher and lecturer, enjoying exchanges with students that faculty half his age could not match. In old age he never forgot what it was to be young. He was charmed by the exuberance of undergraduates as they were charmed by him. The period from the 1950s to the 1980s was a fertile period for the study of political theory in the Government Department at LSE. Oakeshott had attracted an illustrious group of scholars and teachers: John Charvet, Maurice Cranston, Elie Kedourie, Wolfgang von Leyden, Kenneth Minogue, Robert Orr, and others.