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This book is a collection of eight (mostly) recent essays on the work of the 20th-century English philosophic essayist, Michael Oakeshott. Six of them advance the view in different ways that Oakeshott's multifarious lifework may be understood as variations on a singular insight -- that the structure of experiential reality is 'creative' or 'poetic', with the form and content (the how and what) of thought and activity occurring simultaneously and conditioning one another reciprocally; and that this experiential structure has specifiable cultural, political and legal ramifications. In advancing and illustrating this viewpoint, comparisons and contrasts are drawn with medieval nominalism, philosophic idealism, Cartesianism, modernity, post-modernism, Chinese Daoism and with the views of thinkers such as Sir Henry Maine, Charles McIlwain, M.B. Foster, Leo Strauss, A.C. Graham, Friedrich Hayek, Efraim Podoksik, John Liddington, and others. Included also is an essay on the educational vie...

The final chapter of this book clarifies the poetic character of human existence through a reconstruction of Oakeshott's critique of modern rationalism related to mediated experience. In the essays from "Modern Rationalism & Other Politics," Oakeshott contrasts "modern rationalism" as a belief that all real knowledge is technical knowledge susceptible to formulation, capable of universal application against his conceptualization of the fluidity of knowledge. By drawing on M. B. Foster's critique of the Platonic view of artistic creation, Oakeshott builds an argument for a simultaneous & fluid creativity. But, Oakeshott's idealism regarding the human desire for unified experience is in tension with the separated modalities of experience. Rationalism tips the balance even further in an overestimation of the role of conscious intellect in activity, & ruptures the fluidity of action by breaking down into discrete accessible steps what is spontaneously done by adepts. The poetic experience opposes rationalist consciousness by the simultaneous arising of form & content that are equally important & inseparable. 7 References. J. Harwell

AbstractThis article cautions against facilely casting Oakeshott's thought in the mold of either Kantian liberalism for its account of civil association as purely formal association to which rational individuals could consent, or Burkean liberalism for its emphasis on the continuity of general practices and traditions in diurnal politics. Oakeshott's work is then thematically summarized with an eye to showing its artfulness and originality as a synthesis of modern European individualism, providing a theoretical account of civil association which combines, without logical contradiction, the Aristotelian idea of politics as the activity of attending to the arrangements of the whole, and the liberal (and Christian) idea of the individuality of value, mediated (and made logically possible) by the Roman idea of civil obligation to the form of authority.