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Books of Interest on Amazon

I notice that Rodders’ autobiography is released today, not surprisingly, already #113 on Amazon. I hope it’s as cracking a read as Keef’s book released two years ago. I also notice that A Companion to Michael Oakeshott is doing exceedingly well (#115,780) which for a purely academic book is pretty darn amazing (assuming of course…

A Companion to Michael Oakeshott

After a four year gestation with many, often quite bizarre twists and turns, today this project officially reaches its fruition. To read excerpts from each chapter, type “oakeshott” into this site’s search box. a companion to michael oakeshottBritish Idealismdead philosophersMichael OakeshottOakeshottPhilosophy of historyphilosophy of social sciencePolitical philosophyThomas Hobbes

The Morphology of Liberalism

Here’s a book review in The Economist looking at the morphology in meaning attached to (neo)liberalism. Here is the publisher’s blurb. But the line between Smith and Friedman is not a straight one, as Mr Stedman Jones points out. Smith thought one of the state’s jobs should be to build public works and forge institutions…

The Victim of Thought: The Idealist Inheritance

The penultimate chapter to be trailed – David Boucher on Oakeshott’s idealism. Oakeshott’s indebtedness to philosophical idealism has been touched upon by many commentators as incidental to their main concerns, and his relative silence after the Second World War compared with his defiant proclamations of loyalty before it gave rise to suspicions that he was…

Philosophy and its Moods: Oakeshott on the Practice of Philosophy

Extract from Ken McIntyre’s chapter: Among non-academic intellectuals and political theorists, Michael Oakeshott is known primarily as a conservative political thinker who produced a series of essays in the 1950s which were critical of “rationalist” or “ideological” politics. Others who have read more deeply in Oakeshott’s corpus are aware of his contributions to the philosophy…

Michael Oakeshott’s Philosophy of History

In the countdown to October 19th here is the intro to Geoff Thomas’ chapter: Omnis determinatio est negatio, says Spinoza: to specify the nature of anything is also illuminatingly to say what it is not. This remark, whatever its general force, applies exactly to Michael Oakeshott’s philosophy of history. Oakeshott is a polemicist, a prince…

Noel Malcolm on Hobbes

Noel Malcolm’s monumental 2,355 page edition of Leviathan is rightly attracting attention well beyond philosophical circles. And you can read Malcolm’s chapter on Oakeshott’s Hobbes in the forthcoming A Companion to Michael Oakeshott. But things are looking up for the Monster, thanks to the labours of Noel Malcolm, a polymath at All Souls College, Oxford, and a former journalist…