John Gray looks at Oakeshott’s Notebooks.
Unlike many academics he did not crave respectability, intellectual or otherwise; even by today’s standards, his private life might be thought a bit rackety. But the life Oakeshott lived was not an unexamined one; it expressed an idea of individuality he found in the philosophers he most admired.
It is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine a figure like Oakeshott in academic life at the present time. For one thing, he had a wider experience of the world than most academics nowadays.
manwithoutqualities 