Michael Oakeshott, a wide-ranging thinker mostly known for his work in social and political philosophy, was born in Chelsfield, Kent, on December 11, 1901. Oakeshott read history at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and graduated in 1923. He returned as a fellow in 1925. In 1940 he enlisted in the British Army and served with "Phantom," an intelligence unit that worked on artillery spotting. In 1949 he went to Oxford as a fellow of Nuffield College and in 1951 he was appointed to the chair of political science at the London School of Economics. He retired in 1969, but continued to be active from his retirement home in Acton, Dorset, where he died on December 18, 1990.

Experience and Its Modes

Experience and Its Modes (1933) was Oakeshott's first major work. In the book Oakeshott creates some of the major distinctions that mark his social/political philosophy. The most important concerns experience itself. Influenced by...