The political philosopher Michael Oakeshott died in December 1990, a few days after his eighty-ninth birthday. He had enjoyed a fair if controversial reputation in his lifetime among his colleagues, but he never became a global guru in the manner of (say) Gunnar Myrdal, J. K. Galbraith, F. A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, or his own predecessor in the Chair of Political Science at the London School of Economics, Harold Laski. (It is perhaps worth noting, as a sign of the times, how many of these eminences are or were economists.)

Oakeshott's death, and the almost universally glowing obituaries which followed it, sparked off a veritable explosion of interest in his work. There were, I believe, several reasons for Oakeshott's low public profile during his lifetime. The first is purely personal. He was a modest, unassuming man, with a deep aversion to the limelight. By modern academic standards he published little. I always supposed that he had been passed over for public honours, but it now appears he had more than once declined them, on the grounds (one obituarist quoted him as saying) that public honours should be reserved for public people.

Secondly, throughout most of Oakeshott's life the prevailing intellectual atmosphere was contrary to both the spirit and the substance of his work.