Rationalism in politics and other essays [antikvár]

Preface to the first editionOf these essays, composed during the last twelve years, seven were first published elsewhere. Each was written for a different occasion, but they seem to me to go together well enough to be put together. They are all concerned with doing, understanding and explaining; with different modes of these activities and with their relations to one another. And, although they do not compose a settled doctrine, they disclose a consistent style or disposition of thought. The essay on poetry is a belated retraction of a foolish sentence in Experience and Its Modes.M.O. 1962The publication of Rationalism in Politics in 1962 was a major event in contemporary political philosophy, accelerating Michael Oakeshott's advance to the forefront of contemporary political philosophers. This new edition adds six essays, five previously published, and the never before published "Political Discourse," each of which is consistent with the themes and the disposition of the original edition of Rationalism in Politics.The essays now are arranged thematically rather than chronologically, for two reasons: to emphasize the consistency of Michael Oakeshott's thinking in this book with the arguments of Experience and Its Modes (1933) and On Human Conduct (1975), and to incorporate the additions in a coherent manner into the whole. It is important, however, to remember what kind of "whole" Rationalism in Politics is. Professor Oakeshott's own retrospective judgment, twenty-eight years on, was that the book remains a set of essays, "modest intellectual adventures in which a human circumstance is explored, understood and distinguished as an arrEmge-ment of related characteristics composing a coherent 'character',xiiii