Intimations of Oakeshott: A critical reading of his ‘Notebooks,1922–86’

The nature and worth of Michael Oakeshott’s contribution as a political thinker have long been the subject of deep disagreement within the community of Anglophone political theory. In some circles he remains an important figure who, despite the small number of his published works, deserves acclaim as the source of some of the most important, philosophically hewn reflections on politics to have emerged in British intellectual culture during the last century (Zuckert, 2009). And, while the band of those he influenced directly through his teaching and scholarship has dwindled quite considerably from the point when the ‘Oakeshottians’ represented one of the most significant schools within British political theory (Kelly, 2009), his work has continued to serve as a point of attraction and interest. Most recently, he has been claimed as an ally for the enterprises pursued by various contemporary theorists, including those seeking to delineate a postmodernist trajectory in political theory, and those championing his conception of politics as a conversation (Minch, 2009; Rorty, 1980).

Other theorists remain skeptical. Quentin Skinner’s judgement expresses the views of many – and probably the majority – in the Anglophone community of political theory:

I am fairly confident about several points. One is that Oakeshott’s work was of no philosophical influence at all … He was widely understood as an illuminating commentator on Hobbes and I must say I found him virtually unreadable on that subject … Oakeshott seemed a figure of the past and we rejected his anti-rationalism and political conservatism outright … nothing prepared my generation for his apotheosis under Thatcherism, nor the high esteem in which his philosophy continues to be widely held. (Skinner, 2002)

This antinomian reception is rooted both in perceptions of Oakeshott’s ideological preferences and allegiances, and the distance between the nature and focus of his own philosophical interests and the dominant trends in Anglophone political theory from the 1ate 1970s. But it is also the product of a partial familiarity with Oakeshott’s corpus. During his lifetime, his body of published work had a rather slender appearance, comprising two major monographs (Oakeshott, 1933, 1975a), separated by some 40 years, and two rather more accessible collections of essays on politics and history. His most widely read work was the first of these – Rationalism in Politics (originally published in 1962), which included a notable clutch of essays that he wrote in the 1940s. Their wide readership resulted in the application of the ideological label conservative to his thinking, and this has undoubtedly had a somewhat distorting effect upon perceptions of his intellectual contribution.

Following his death in 1990, however, a much larger body of writings, from different stages of his life, has become available. And, with their appearance comes the opportunity for a more rounded and contextually meaningful appreciation of the development and range of his thought. There are now six additional collections of essays, reviews and lectures, all compiled and edited with care and skill by Luke O’ Sullivan. ¹ In this same period, there has been a notable increase in the number of academic treatments of different aspects of his thought. ² And this welter of posthumous publication has done much to create the impetus for the reappraisal of the status and import of Oakeshott’s diverse body of writing, and a reassessment of his place in the pantheon of British political thinking.

A considerable portion of his intellectual life – including all of the ‘middle years’ between the appearance of Experience and its Modes (1933) and On Human Conduct (1975a) – has been terra incognita for many of his interpreters. And, as a result, it has been hard to grasp the relationship between the seemingly disparate ideas set out in these different works. But with the publication of his Notebooks, we are afforded the chance to form a nuanced and informed understanding of how the thinking in them interconnected, and to appreciate the range of intellectual influences and political preoccupations that characterised his work. As O’Sullivan observes, they ‘… open a window onto Oakeshott’s intellectual development that simply cannot be found elsewhere in his writings … and make clear continuities in his thought, such as a persistent interest in Christianity, which are much less visible elsewhere’ (O’Sullivan 2014: vii).

Above all, these private writings offer insight into the mixture of personal, cultural and political factors that shaped this extraordinary mind. The idiosyncratic and – typically cryptic – jottings and thoughts contained in this volume have been culled from an array of journals written between 1922 and 1986. These include his own reflections on a host of philosophical issues, topical political and cultural questions and personal preoccupations, intermingled with quotations and passages transcribed from other writers, as well as short essays, dreamy asides and a number of heartfelt, often narcissistic, musings on the state of his own romantic life.

The prevailing style is cryptic and, as their editor rightly notes, deliberately aphoristic. O’Sullivan indeed contends that they should be placed within a European ‘aphoristic tradition’ which tended to regard successful aphorisms as ‘brief, definitive and philosophical’, and which incorporated such figures as Pascal, the Marquis de Vauvenargues, Nietzsche and Bradley – all of who are liberally referenced in the Notebooks.

As well as offering invaluable material for the biographer, these materials supply important clues about some of the intellectual threads running throughout Oakeshott’s various works, and point to a string of normative commitments which recurred throughout his evolving thinking, several of which render him a much harder figure to appropriate for those engaged in contemporary normative projects than is typically appreciated. The place and persistence of these norms are of particular importance to the study of Oakeshott’s own thought given his own repeated insistence upon the inadmissibility of normative considerations to the enterprise of theorising about politics.

The Notebooks are striking too for the combination of mood and tone that run throughout them. They reveal a rich seam of cultural pessimism intermingled with a deep-seated romanticism. Both of these moods infuse the many reflections upon love, life, death, morality and Christianity that pepper these writings. Among these, his musings on the ontological condition of mortality and the potential for both religion and love to help us deal with the limitations that defy dreams of human perfectibility are particularly striking. So too is the deep scepticism he manifests towards claims advanced in the name of three of the rising forces of the twentieth century – science, materialism and progress. His critical reflections in these areas are saturated with references to romantic literature and poetry. As O’Sullivan observes, the Notebooks demonstrate that ‘his interest in Romanticism was not purely academic; in his youth in particular he treated it as a living tradition which had a major impact on his approach to life’ (2014: xi).

It was against this backdrop that the youthful Oakeshott dramatised an insurmountable conflict between ‘worldly’ and ‘spiritual’ values. In one of his early essays, Religion and the World (1933), and also in On Human Conduct (1975a), he presented questions of belief and purpose as integral aspects of the pursuit of ‘the good’, but also as immune to any kind of rational evaluation or objective measurement. Questions of meaning and moral conviction were indissolubly connected in his mind with an acceptance of what he called the ‘deadliness of doing’ (1975a, 74). This signalled the conviction that:

… the actual conditions of life are always more or less unsatisfactory. This is the condition of mortality – what are we to do about it. A belief in progress does not help … We must admit this condition, admit it as the actual essence & character of human life, & from it we must derive our values: they must be the values of mortality. (2014, Notebook 13 [16], 286–287)

There is a restive, angst-ridden, quality, to the early Oakeshott’s reflections on these themes, and these are interfused with the rather romantic notion that the cultivation of certain kinds of cultural practice offers the best prospect for a deeper understanding of the limits of the human condition. Writing in 1928 he enquired:

How then shall we employ ourselves? What employment is there that will not distract us from this purpose to be without a purpose, this accomplishment to achieve nothing? No employment can save us. But cookery is better than most … here if anywhere is the art which may be practiced for art’s sake: the contemporary life. (Notebook 10 [79], 155)

The worldly/spiritual duality was one of a succession of dichotomies through which he tended to anchor his thinking and corral the ideas of other traditions and philosophers into very broadly drawn alternative types. While these varied in their terminology and focus, each of these dualities expressed an entrenched dichotomy between the modernist notion of the conscious pursuit of pre-determined goals – an endeavour that was bound to lead to disappointment, frustration and futility – and the ‘worldly’ embrace of the sensual, the experiential and the contingent. Restated, and subtly re-conceptualised, versions of this duality crop up throughout his writing. The first appearance of this dichotomous habit can be located in an early essay Work and Play (published 1995), where he countered the instrumental pursuit of pre-determined goals – which he called ‘work’ – and the spirit of ludens, an intuitive embrace of the ethos of enjoyment, experience and emotion. The metaphor of ‘play’ was especially important. It signalled his commitment to the intrinsic value of experience, as opposed to the pre-determination of one’s goals and desires, and also the need to submit oneself to an external set of rules which provide the necessary conditions for the playing of the game.

In On Human Conduct, this abstract dichotomy re-emerged, but was now couched in a different philosophical idiom. There he pointed to the intrinsic importance of ‘adverbial’, non-instrumental rules of conduct and those norms and rules which were formed around the pursuit of specific goals. And he established a connection between this dichotomy and his very well-known distinction between ‘civil’ and ‘enterprise’ association. Distancing himself from liberal understandings of the relationship between individual and law which posited the latter as a restraint upon the liberty of the citizen, he argued for an adverbial conception of morality in the public realm, and a legal code founded upon its principles, as the preconditions for the exercise of liberty. The status and implications of this distinction have been queried by a number of commentators, including those broadly sympathetic to his ideas (for instance Gray 1993; Letwin 2011).

As well as offering us glimpses of the patterns of thinking which pre-dated and prepared the way for some of his later, better known formulations on politics and state, The Notebooks confirm the judgement of those scholars – for instance Elizabeth Corey, Wendell John Coats Jr., Glen Worthington and Timothy Fuller – who have stressed the integral importance of religion to his thought. In another early essay, Religion and the World (written in 1929 and published in 1993), he elaborated the principles that in his mind spanned the conventional divides between theology, morality and political philosophy. On this occasion, he sketched a contrast between ‘worldly man’ and ‘religious man’, and these ideas undergirded his critique, in the 1940s, of rationalism and its influence upon politicians and planners. Those who lived in the ‘worldly way’, he maintained, directed their lives toward the pursuit of various kinds of ‘immanent’ ideals, including those associated with religion. Fulfilment, according to this model, was deferred to an unknown and unknowable future, and goals pursued only so far as they fitted with this schema, or accomplishments praised according to norms that had been stipulated prior to experience itself. But ‘religious man’ – unlike many actual people who pursued religious convictions – did not, he insisted, live by deferring satisfaction but was fully immersed in, and open to, pleasures and pain associated with experience in the here-and-now, living truly in the present. This, he argued, represented ‘… the difference between mere inconsequent flitting from one occupation indifferently pursued to the next as lazily followed – the present for the sake of the present – & the present for the sake of life, for the sake of freedom’ (Oakeshott 2014, Secularism Notebook [15], 193). The truly good life, he was convinced, was that associated with the unselfconscious libertine, a character who – following conventional usage – he typically sketched in the image of the gentlemanly amateur.

The Notebooks offer ample evidence that romantic themes, works and motifs underscored this radically individualistic understanding of the self. And this may well represent their most significant contribution to the field of Oakeshott studies, as they illustrate the constitutive role in this thinking of his romantically inclined, non-materialistic conception of the good, and suggest that interpretations which stress his Tory traditionalism and set him in the footsteps of Burke, are wide of the mark. They show too that he was endlessly preoccupied by the figure of the rakish gentleman, a subject typically presented in the wider culture as emblematic of a disappearing age. Oakeshott gave this figure more intellectual depth than many others did, identifying origins in Aristotelian thought and sanctifying the gentleman as the vehicle of the ideal of unfettered individuality.

A handful of commentators have identified this character as the assumed subject of Oakeshottian thought. Shirley Letwin, in her The Gentleman in Trollope (1982, 276n), long ago characterised Oakeshott’s On Human Conduct as an extended effort to propound the morality of the gentleman. And Steven J Wulf depicted his ethical preferences as ‘civilized self-cultivation, personal integrity, restraint from mean endeavours, and a nonchalance concerning risk … they neatly fuse several conceptions of the gentleman which had long been extolled in [Victorian and Edwardian] British literature and school culture’ (2007). He also viewed Oakeshott’s fascination with the disappearing gentlemanly ideal as closely intertwined with his romantic sensibilities.

Aristotle aside, the gentlemanly amateur was, for Oakeshott, a descendant of the Epicurean tradition, and the latter was a surprisingly common point of reference in The Notebooks. Thus, an author widely seen as the high priest of twentieth-century Conservatism was in fact a strong advocate of a conception of freedom that was strongly individualistic, and decidedly libertarian, at least in his early years. The enemies of liberty were latter-day stoics, for whom … ‘to despise ambition & to be free from the world had become a cult – a negative cult. But with Epicurus, it was a positive way of life – “Live Alone”’. The freedom of the Stoic was an escape: that of the Epicurean a fulfillment’ (2014, Notebook 11 [41], 230).

The employment of the term ‘religious’ to describe such a moral outlook was deliberately paradoxical, but also reflected a very distinctive understanding of religion and its purposes. As Robert Grant (2012) has shown, Oakeshott did in fact subscribe to a broadly Christian outlook during the 1920s and had a deep interest in theological questions and writings. But, in the light of The Notebooks, it is clear that depicting him as conventionally Christian is also somewhat misleading. As he observed in an early Notebook:

Christianity has rejected the ethical scheme propounded by Jesus. E.g. the moral outlook of Jesus would for example have countenanced sexual intercourse, but not if it led to children. The present, but not the future. (2014, Notebook 10 [56], 147)

What he derived from religion was not a commitment to the promise of a realm of unconditional freedom, but the injunction to live and enjoy life in the contradictory complexity of the present:

That is what is wrong: life lived for ‘what comes after’ …. understood as what we have earned here and made the ideal of a consequential moral and religious life. What matters is here and now. Death is the most important event in life, but because of what it ends, not what it may begin. A religion dominated by the notion of ‘salvation’ is corrupt (& unchristian) as a morality dominated by the natural or penal consequences of ill-doing. (2014, Notebook 21 [24], 550)

This profound objection to the metaphysical idea of a realm of emancipation, which, once attained, would save those virtuous souls who understood its promise, suggests an important overlap between his ethical, theological and political sensibilities. A very similar objection informed his scepticism towards those political philosophies that were animated by the dream of establishing heaven-on-earth, and which he – and various other European intellectuals in the middle of the twentieth century – regarded as harbouring a latently totalitarian potential.

Intimately bound up with his various reflections on mortality and religion in The Notebooks is a consistent interest in the philosophical and moral implications of love. In 1922, he observed that ‘in love our existence is made intelligible. For in love all contraries are reconciled’ (2014, Notebook 1 [50], 3). The experience of loving or being in love created the ultimately unfulfilled promise of some resolution of the foundational paradoxes and fallibilities of human existence. But love, like play, was only meaningful if embraced and lived as an end in its own right. It represented one of the vital ingredients of the outlook of the ‘religious man’, he declared in 1933, along with friendship and contemplation. What he abhorred from an early stage was the tendency to regard these qualities through the lens of instrumental satisfaction – as a means to the various ends that the modern age enshrined.

Doggedly faithful to his romantic roots, Oakeshott can be placed among a larger band of mid-century British intellectuals – some with very different political sympathies to his own – who believed that it was in poetry, not the prose of the technician or politician, that the intrinsic importance of friendship and love could be grasped:

loving is not ‘doing good’; it is not a duty; it is emancipated from having to approve or disapprove … what is communicated and enjoyed is not an array of emotions – affection, tenderness, concern, fear, elation, etc. – but the uniqueness of a self. (1959a, 537, n3)

On this theme, he filled up 11 separate notebooks – all of which are reproduced here – between 1928 and 1934. These are named after Keats’s poem ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’. In these jottings, the young Oakeshott intersperses high-flown observations about the nature of love and loss with narcissistic complaints about his girlfriend, Céline, and howls of thinly veiled sexual frustration. These passages are unlikely to find favour among many contemporary interpreters, and their amoral and misogynistic aspects may well make some of his current advocates reconsider their allegiances to him. But they also provide a fascinating insight into the different domains – the personal, the philosophical and the aesthetic – where Oakeshott was willing to explore the nature and implications of the distinctive combination of philosophical scepticism and romantic individualism which united and defined his intellectual and personal sensibilities.

The overall picture that emerges of the author of these reflections is of a complex figure who looks, for the most part, much more like a libertarian individualist than a Burkean conservative. The ethos to which he subscribed was recurrently depicted through positive references to the ‘manly’ values associated with the gentleman, including ‘… “Physical” courage, nerve, respect for tradition & contempt for convention, a proud sense of personal honour, an indifference to death …’. These he characterised as the moral outlook of ‘… an aristocrat’ (2014, Notebook 20 [11], 507), an embodiment of ‘the standard of Hellenic Life and Culture’ (Aristotle Notebook 2 [44], 48). His thinking on this score was derived from a scattergun of different sources, including the writings of Pascal and Montaigne on integrity and probity. Among his contemporaries, the artist who came closest to this outlook was DH Lawrence, whose novels include characters, Oakeshott observed, who ‘… follow no calling or trade, … are not concerned to eat & drink, they make no money – but they live’ (2014, Belle Dame Notebook 5 [02–04], 183). The literary culture of his early adulthood may well have served as a more important source of intellectual influence and inspiration for him than the idealist philosophical tradition with which he has routinely been associated.

Among the masculine virtues which are hymned in The Notebooks, courage was especially prominent. And in these private writings, he explores one particular exemplar – Admiral Nelson (whose biography he appears to have considered writing) – in some depth. ³ Nelson, he announces, was not driven by ‘exterior success’ or ‘tangible ends’ but by ‘interior success’ – ‘honour’, ‘reputation’, ‘fame’. And he approvingly notes Aristotle’s claim that ‘courage is no mere matter of discipline, but is an energy of the individual soul – a quality of character’ (2014, Notebook 2 [14], 45). Courage is lauded in stark opposition to the ‘safety-first’ attitude which he regards as the principle of loving which modernity enshrines, one which is fit merely for ‘getting off a bus!’. (2014, Aristotle Notebooks 2 [15], 45)

Appreciating the extent of the romantic influence upon him helps explain the difficulty of aligning Oakeshott with any single ideological perspective. Indeed, The Notebooks lend support to the interpretative argument that his work can in some ways be read as an elegiac hymn to a way of life that was fast disappearing. In one sense, this judgment suggests a line of connection between his thinking and ostensibly conservative political sentiments – and it is notable that at various points he depicts the British Conservative party as the political force most congruent with his own outlook. Thus, in 1978 he wrote that:

A state is understood as persons associated, not in respect of their interests and of the substantive satisfactions they may choose to seek transactionally or co-operatively among themselves, but in respect of their acknowledgment of the authority of certain non-instrumental conditions of conduct …. Such a view of the office of government, which owes more to the Whigs than the Tories, is deeply embedded in our constitutional arrangements … but if it now has a home anywhere in our politics it is surely in the Conservative party …. Mrs Thatcher seems more of a genuine Conservative than her predecessors. (2008: 281–282)

But, for the most part, politicians from the political right were just as likely to embody the kinds of utilitarian and progressivist sentiments which he regarded as increasingly hegemonic, and as liable to drive to the margins the kinds of cultural ethos and character which he favoured.

He directed more enmity towards trends in the culture and society around him than he did to particular political figures or parties. An important essay penned towards the end of the 1970s – The Tower of Babel ⁴ – reveals that the creeping melancholy which is apparent throughout The Notebooks had begun to crystallise into a gloomy sense of defeat. As Noel O’Sullivan (2001) has observed, ‘… everything he came to value in education, social life and the politics of civil association was unlikely to endure for much longer in an age which has become almost completely devoid of any sense of play’. The instrumentalism which had infused public education, at both secondary and University levels, was caustically rejected: ‘For centuries … “Education” has meant a release from the current vulgarities of the world …’, while now it amounts merely to instruction in ‘the current vulgarities’ (Notebook 17 [66], 442). And as early as 1936, he was convinced that the degradation of education was symptomatic of a deeper and wider loss:

Education now. The whole force and pressure of the contemporary western world is against education. It is a world of violent stimuli – film, radio, newspapers, magazines – and a mind early adapted to these stimuli will be a mind so much less capable of suffering that slow permeation of the personality that is characteristic of great literature. The world once, undesignedly, offered no positive opposition to this: the walk to school, the relatively slow moving days, long days without movement, time for enjoyment, time for recollection, time for doing nothing. (2014, A Conversation, 1944, 346)

The Notebooks reflect the workings of a highly individualistic, romantic and pessimistic mind that was growing increasingly disillusioned with the pattern and pace of twentieth-century life. His observations on the growing import of science and technology were unremittingly negative, and sometimes vituperative: ‘Rape is the typical crime of modern politics; politicians rape their victims, rulers rape their subjects; technology is the rape of the earth’ (2014, Notebook 17 [72], 444). This outlook underpinned the well-known critique of rationalism which he expressed in the 1940s:

… if the scientist were to perish along with the civilization he has created, nobody could regret this loss. No, my view of the menace of the scientist is more profoundly shocking than this … the science ridden civilization is a menace to civilized life. Worse than a menace; it has already removed from mankind both the hope & the desire for a civilized mode of existence … the scientist does not keep himself to himself – he is an evangelist, a preacher with a gospel that is anything but good news … it has created a civilization which is a menace to civilized life … the price we have paid for allowing the scientist to do what he likes with the world is a civilization based on false hopes, desires & values: a radical perversion of human life. (2014, Notebook 13, 305)

In some moods, this rejection of scientism amounted to a blimpish rejection of scientific advance in all its forms:

the inventions of ‘science’ – what do people want with all this electricity rushing up & down the country – telephone & telegraph (2014, A Conversation [32], 328).

Some of these observations and reflections reflect sentiments which rarely surfaced in his philosophical writings, and need to be treated carefully on that basis. But there are many different connections between the material in The Notebooks and the works that he did publish in these years, and these are suggestive of important intellectual overlaps between them. This volume includes early versions of some essays, for instance, as well as passages that are close in content and tone to some that appeared in print. One of these – A Conversation (which he wrote in 1944) – offers an early indication of his feel for one of the most distinctive metaphors with which he remains indelibly associated – the idea of politics as a dialogue. In this work, he depicted ‘the political’ as a civilised and structured set of interactions taking place within an established set of rules, rather than a set of practices and institutions that should be subordinated to particular moral goals. Here too, The Notebooks serve to underscore a feature of his thinking that has been downplayed in existing commentary on him – the nature and depth of his commitment to the role of scepticism in politics. This is most apparent from his various comments on the role and nature of political leadership and ‘the statesman’ within the Notebooks:

We often blame statesmen for lack of enthusiasm, or cynicism, or scepticism – they ought to be sceptical & even cynical – A man without a measure of these qualities is without the basis of really sound judgment – blind enthusiasm never accomplished anything single-handed. A sceptical people is a sad spectacle, a sceptical statesman is a necessity. (2014, X, 105)

It is also striking that some of the key concepts with which his political thinking has become closely associated are quite notable by their relative absence from these private reflections – most strikingly the idea of ‘civil association’ which appears only twice in the seven decades that this collection covers. Whether this signals that its importance has been overstated in commentary upon his work is an important interpretative question. And it is noteworthy too that Hobbes – with whom he is identified as a result of his book on him (1975b) – figures hardly at all. Nietzsche, however, is repeatedly referenced.

But while the concept of civil association may be largely absent, the pattern of thinking to which it fits is very much present throughout these writings. There is a clear, on-going concern to delineate politics as a set of procedures, institutional rules and non-coercive laws that set the terms for the peaceful co-existence of citizens pursuing different, and irreconcilable, moral goals. What these writings also show is that this perspective bumped along with a highly sceptical take upon the actual practice of politics and politicians: ‘politics is an uninteresting form of human activity to anyone who has no desire to rule others’ (2014, Notebook 16 [53], 418), and ‘politics is a suitable subject of conversation – indeed perhaps that is all it is suitable for’ (2014, A Conversation [D], 361). Most of what he says about politics and politicians is, as O’Sullivan observes, in a ‘withering tone’ (O’Sullivan 2014: xi).

What is also apparent here is that one of the sources of such judgments was Oakeshott’s enduring, Edwardian unease about the advent of mass democracy. ‘The people’ are very rarely invoked in a positive manner in relation to the politics of his age. As he put it in 1955, the nature of democratic politics ‘is what makes democracy difficult. Not only or not so much, the stupidity of the mass, but their superstition’ (2014, Notebook 14 [12], 373). This powerful seam of pessimism about the participative dimension of democratic politics needs to be brought into plain sight for those debating his relevance and considered along with those features of his thought that continue to appeal today. This should not be taken to mean that his thinking is devoid of insight for those theorising the nature and specificity of ‘the political’, but it ought to suggest that an anchorage in Oakeshottian thinking is an inherently paradoxical, and necessarily uncomfortable one, for those committed to democratic values.

Quite frequently – as for instance in his essay ‘The Masses in Representative Democracy’ – he depicts ‘mass man’ as an archetype who stands in stark contrast with the spirit and ethos of the rugged individualist, the courageous gentleman. But Oakeshott knew all too well that the conditions in which the latter could thrive were disappearing, and so the alternative, individualist ideal which he lauded was freighted with a deep sense of elegy and loss. This medley of ideas constituted the platform upon which his own, highly distinctive, understanding of the political took shape. Politics, he argued, needed to be understood within its own limits, and insulated from moral visions and ideological programmes that threatened to jeopardise its constitutive features. And it needed to be preserved, above all, from hubristic theories that regarded it as the vehicle for the realisation of some ulterior purpose. In the wake of the publication of this extraordinary and troubling hotchpotch of reflections and ruminations, we are provided with a unique insight into the range of cultural influences and intellectual sources which flowed into the political thinking of this most English of minds. And we are given a rare opportunity to recalibrate our judgements of one of the most beguiling European philosophers of the twentieth century.