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What is History? and other essays

Micheal Oakeshott
Luke O'Sullivan, Editor

This highly readable new collection of thirty pieces by Michael Oakeshott, almost all of which are previously unpublished, covers every decade of his intellectual career. These essays adds significantly to his contributions to the philosophy of historical understanding and political philosophy, as well as to the philosophy of education and aesthetics. The essays were intended mostly for lectures or seminars and are consequently in an informal style that will be accessible to new readers as well as to those already well acquainted with Oakeshott's works.

Early pieces include a long essay 'On the Relations of Philosophy, Poetry, and Reality', and Oakeshott's comments on 'The Cambridge School of Political Science' through which he himself had passed as an undergraduate. The collection also reproduces a substantial wartime essay 'On Peace with Germany'. There are two new essays on the philosophy of education, and the essay which gives the work its title, 'What is History?', is just one of over half a dozen discussions of the nature of historical knowledge. Oakeshott's later sceptical, 'hermeneutic', thought is also well represented by pieces such as 'What is Political Theory?' and 'The Emergence of the History of Thought.' Reviews of books by English and European contemporaries such as Butterfield, Hayek, Voegelin, and Arendt also help to place him in context more clearly than before.

The book will be indispensable for all Oakeshott's readers, no matter which area of his thought concerns them most.

Table of Contents

  • Introduction
  • History is a Fable (1923)
  • The Cambridge School of Political Science (1924)
  • An Essay on the Relations of Philosophy, Poetry and Reality (1925)
  • The Philosophy of History (1928)
  • What Do We Look for in an Historian? (1928)
  • The Social and Political Doctrines of Contemporary Europe (1939)
  • On Peace with Germany (1943)
  • The Voice of Conversation in the Education of Mankind (c .1948)
  • The Philosophy of History (1948)
  • Richard Hooker
  • The Whig Interpretation of History (1951)
  • The New Society (1951)
  • The New Science of Politics (1953)
  • Freedom and Power (195-?)
  • Conduct and Ideology in Politics (c .1955)
  • The Idea of 'Character' in the Interpretation of Modern Politics (195-?)
  • Democracy in England (1957)
  • Current Ideas about Government (1959?)
  • The Constitution of Liberty (1959?)
  • Work and Play (c. 1960?)
  • Between Past and Future (1961)
  • What is History? (1961)
  • On Arriving at a University (1961?)
  • The Historiography of Max Lenz (196-)
  • The Emergence of the History of Thought (1967)
  • The Character of a University Education (1970)
  • What is Political Theory? (1973)
  • Political Thought as a Subject of Historical Enquiry (1980)
  • Law (1980)
  • Europe, the Emergence of an Idea (1981)
  • Index of Name, Persons and Places
  • Index of Subjects
  • Index of Works

· ISBN 0-907845-83-5 · Published February 2004 by Imprint Academic · Cloth · 480 pages · $58.00 ·

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