Michael Oakeshott on the Human Condition is a collection of sixteen essays that constitute Timothy Fuller’s reflections over a period of forty-five years on Michael Oakeshott’s understanding of the human condition, including his central ideas on politics, philosophy, religion, and conservatism. Fuller is arguably the most recognized Oakeshott scholar worldwide, and these essays express not […]
A chemist and member of a family renowned for its learning in several disciplines, Michael Polanyi experienced first-hand the horrors of totalitarian government and worldwide war. He argued that centrally planned organizations—or governments—based solely on the methods of science threaten to foreclose a full human knowledge of the mysteries of existence and therefore pose […]
Of Michael Oakeshott and his interest in Thomas Hobbes, Professor Paul Franco has written, “The themes Oakeshott stresses in his interpretation of Hobbes are . . . skepticism about the role of reason in politics, allegiance to the morality of individuality as opposed to any sort of collectivism, and the principle of a noninstrumental, […]
[…] work. The host and moderator for the lectures is the Chairman of the Committee on Social Thought, Professor Robert Pippin. Volume 3: Hayek, Practitioner of Social Justice Michael Novak, George Frederick Jewett Scholar in Religion and Public Policy and Director of Social and Political Studies, American Enterprise Institute Novak is the author of twenty-five […]
[…] the most noted Catholic philosophers and authors of our day. He has taught at the University of Notre Dame since 1955, and since 1978 has been the Michael P. Grace Professor of Medieval Studies. He also serves as Director of the Jacques Maritain Center at Notre Dame. McInerny has written a number of important […]
Rationalism in Politics established the late Michael Oakeshott as the leading conservative political theorist in modern Britain. This expanded collection of essays astutely points out the limits of “reason” in rationalist politics and criticizes ideological schemes to reform society according to supposedly “scientific” or rationalistic principles that ignore the wealth and variety of human […]
By 1989, when Michael Oakeshott’s Voice of Liberal Learning was first published by Yale University Press, books that held a negative view of education in the United States had garnered a remarkable amount of attention. Oakeshott’s approach to the subject is subtle, comprehensive, and radical—in the sense of summoning readers to the root of […]
[…] explores themes central to the human experience: the nature of history, the rule of law, and the quest for power that is intrinsic to the human condition. Michael Oakeshott believed, as Timothy Fuller observes, that “the historian’s effort to understand the past without ulterior motive effort which distinguishes the historian from all who examine […]
This conference examined the political thought of Michael Oakeshott in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, but also in The Voice of Liberal Learning. We brought Oakeshott's views on rationalism, politics, freedom, conservatism, morality, and education for the first time to a Latin American audience.
In England, history and religion have supported liberty and sustained opposition to interference by the state. The conference evaluated this long-standing discussion about these three themes in works of twentieth-century authors Herbert Butterfield, Michael Oakeshott, and Maurice Cowling, each of whom lived in a secular environment while demonstrating, in his…
