Talk:
“Michael Oakeshott, rationalism and British conservatism”
by
Robert Grant
University of Glasgow
robert.grant@glasgow.ac.uk
Date and Room Info
Monday, April 27, 2026, 12:30 p.m.
A-130
Abstract
Conservatism aims at conserving a culture, rather than pursuing material goals. Why? Because even when anti-individualist, culture is the matrix of personal identity. Of course every culture requires material support. But that is not to say, with Marxism, that it is materially determined.
Like culture, conservatism globally takes many different, indeed opposed, forms. (E.g. in Russia, Solzhenitsyn vs. Suslov, or Navalny vs. Putin.) Their common impulse is to preserve (or restore) the known and familiar. But in some societies, those things may be so oppressive as not to seem worth preserving. (Even Aztec revivalists have not offered to restore human sacrifice.)
A self-taught philosopher, Oakeshott was less a political theorist than a political critic or psychologist. His bête noire was ‘rationalism’, the inappropriate application of (usually) quasi-scientific reasoning to cultural matters, especially politics. Science is mechanistic, whereas humans are creatures of culture, self-moved, who resent being treated like inert chess pieces (cf. Adam Smith, George Orwell). Cultural matters have their own indigenous, more relevant, conceptions of reason.
Though traditionalist, Oakeshott was essentially a liberal. This is simply because, for concrete historical reasons, the British tradition is itself liberal. Most of us feel at home in it, because it has made us what we are. But Oakeshott was also pragmatic, and shunned liberal ideology as too abstract, universal and ‘rationalist’.
Short Bio
Professor Robert Grant is Emeritus Professor and Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow, where he has taught since 1974, holding a personal chair in the History of Ideas since 2004. He was educated at King’s College School, Wimbledon, and Trinity College, Cambridge. He held a Research Fellowship at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, before appointments at the Universities of Sussex and Glasgow.
He is the author of three books: Oakeshott (Claridge Press, 1989), The Politics of Sex and Other Essays (Macmillan, 2000), and Imagining the Real: Essays on Politics, Ideology and Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). He has published more than 120 articles, reviews, book chapters and encyclopedia entries in journals including Inquiry, Philosophy, History of Political Thought, and History of European Ideas, as well as the Times Literary, Educational and Higher Education Supplements.
He has held visiting positions at Dartmouth College, Bowling Green State University, and the Institute of Political Studies in Lisbon, where he was British Council Distinguished Guest Professor. He has given around sixty invited lectures across Europe, North America, and beyond, including at Princeton, Boston University, Oxford and Cambridge. His visits to Czechoslovakia and Poland in the 1980s included lectures for the underground university run by the Jan Hus Educational Foundation in defiance of Communist authorities. He is currently completing a biography of the philosopher Michael Oakeshott for Yale University Press.