Michael Oakeshott was born 120 years ago today. I posted last year on the 30th anniversary of his death, providing some links hopefully useful for those who are not familiar with his work. The question asked by the title of that post (“Michael Oakeshott: A Hero for Whom?”) is perhaps all the more pertinent these days, with “conservatism” becoming “nationalism” and often furiously in favor of bigger government (see, on that, this report on a recent ISI conference by James Patterson. A very good piece but quite a depressing read, at least to me).
For this anniversary, I would like to point to a true jewel among Oakeshott’s works, though a not particularly well known one. I am referring to the selection from his Notebooks published in 2014, edited and with a beautiful Introduction by Luke O’Sullivan. Oakeshott himself compared his notebooks to “a sort of Zibaldone: a written chaos”. The selection O’Sullivan edited and published is quite that; it emphasizes Oakeshott’s literary sensibility and presents his notes on thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle, but also Montaigne and Schopenhauer. That would be quite something on its own merit. But Oakeshott also wrote a large number of aphorisms, which are, most of them, simply magnificent. The topics range from the nature of politics to love (and women), from the “balance” between the bohemian and the bourgeois, to the character of literary men. They are, evidently, notes taken during a life of reflections, scintillating thoughts which flashed in his mind and he put on paper. Some of them are little sentences you could spend hours in pondering. Others are formidable bon mots. Some give you a glimpse into his wider thinking. Others just make you crack up laughing.
Here are a few (in no particular order). If you want to make yourself a nice Christmas present, buy the book and dig into it, from time to time.
Curious as a concierge.
The awful spectacle of the contempt of small minds for those a little smaller!
Human fulfillment is not another state, following upon the conduct of life, as wages follow work.
To treat each day as it were our life and not a prologue.
The bourgeois holds the world together for the poet.
Power makes men stupid. It corrupts because it intoxicates.
Fear his its own father and a most prolific self-propagator.
The real grievances of mankind are incurable; politics consists in manufacturing curable grievances.
Revolutions design to demolish cathedrals, but like earthquakes, they are apt also to fracture the main drain.
To have a head so full of ideas that there is no room for sense.
Perhaps the greatest principle in politics is that people love to be frightened.
READER COMMENTS
Todd Moodey
Dec 11 2021 at 5:53pm
Thanks Alberto for sharing these, and for highlighting this particular work of Oakeshott’s. The aphorism about mankind’s grievances and their relation to politics is especially interesting: the appropriate application to our modern age seems to be that politics now consists either in the never-ending manufacture of curable grievances or the manufacture of (faux) grievances whose meliorators claim are never quite resolved, but can be with just a bit more money, regulation, “national dialogue”, etc.
Regards,
Todd Moodey
Mark Brady
Dec 12 2021 at 7:15pm
And for another side of Michael Oakeshott.
“Oakeshott may have been ‘careful to separate his private life from his work’, whatever that means, but, in the words (to me) of the late Dr Anne Bohm, his loyal and valued lieutenant at LSE for more than twenty years, ‘he never tried to hide it’, and was even ‘proud’ of having ‘seduced all his students’ wives’….In general, however, had Oakeshott really wanted to keep his private life private, he could hardly have shown himself less competent at doing so. His Army nickname was ‘Dipstick’.”
Robert Grant on Michael Oakeshott. http://www.michael-oakeshott-association.com/reply-to-kekes-by-bob-grant/
You can imagine what our friends would say if Karl Marx had acquired this s0briquet.
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