Hostname: page-component-68945f75b7-6rp8b Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-09-04T23:37:10.288Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott. By Terry Nardin. University Park: Pennsylvania State Press, 2001. 264p. $35.00

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 January 2004

Steven A. Gerencser
Affiliation:
Indiana University South Bend

Extract

“Every man, I suppose, has his political opinions,” Michael Oakeshott once asserted, “but a political philosopher has something more, and more significant, than political opinions: he has an analysis of political activity, a comprehensive view of the nature of political life, and it is this … which is profitable for a later and different age to study” (Oakeshott, “Thomas Hobbes,” Scrutiny 4 [1935–36]: 265). Terry Nardin seems inspired by Oakeshott to take this attitude a step further, as if to say a political philosopher may have an analysis of political activity, but a philosopher has something more significant, a comprehensive view of human experience, and it is this that is profitable for a later age to study. Thus, the title of Nardin's book, The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott holds the nugget of his thesis: Michael Oakeshott was a philosopher, and it is as a philosopher, not a political theorist or a moralist or a historian of ideas, that we must first come to know him.

Type
Book Reviews
Copyright
2003 by the American Political Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)