Browsing by Subject "Oakeshott"
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Item Open Access The Cambridge School, c.1875-c.1975(Imprint Academic, 2016) Alexander, J.The ‘Cambridge School’ is a term associated with some historians of political thought who since the 1960s have claimed to have something to say of contemporary relevance about politics. Here it is argued that the School has to be understood as a long consequence of Seeley’s determination at the foundation of the Historical Tripos in the 1870s to relate history and politics to each other. For a century almost all the major figures in Cambridge agreed that history and politics should be related, but disagreed about how to do it. The writings of Seeley, Sidgwick, Acton, Maitland, Figgis, Barker, Oakeshott, Cowling, Laslett, Runciman, Dunn, Skinner and others are studied here in order to indicate how the historians of the Cambridge School for a century attempted to relate history and politics in not one but four ways — through political science, the history of political thought, political philosophy and political theology. © 2017 Imprint Academic. All rights reserved.Item Open Access Oakeshott's theory of freedom as recognized contingency(SAGE Publications, 2003) Podoksik, E.This article argues that Oakeshott's theory of freedom possesses a greater degree of coherence than is often perceived. Freedom in Oakeshott's philosophy may be defined as 'recognized contingency', combining the notions of a genuine choice of action and of an agent's awareness of having such a choice. Oakeshott employs his notion of freedom in two different contexts. One is the context in which freedom is understood as a concept distinguishing what is conceived as 'human' from what is conceived as 'non-human'. The other context is that of membership in societies, which under certain circumstances can be characterized either by the presence or the lack of freedom. The article argues that, while at first glance Oakeshott's ideas look counter-intuitive, at a deeper level this understanding of freedom is akin to that prevalent in the consciousness of modern liberal societies. © SAGE Publications Ltd.Item Open Access The philosophy of political history in Oakeshott and Collingwood(Brill Academic Publishers, 2016) Alexander, J.Every political philosopher has a philosophy of political history, if sometimes not a very good one. Oakeshott and Collingwood are two twentieth century political philosophers who were particularly concerned with the significance of history for political philosophy; and who both, in the 1940s, sketched what I call philosophies of political history: that is, systematic schemes which could make sense of the entire history of political philosophy. In this article I observe that Oakeshott depended for the political threefold sketched in his Introduction to Hobbes's Leviathan on a threefold Collingwood had developed in relation to science in The Idea of Nature. This is, I think, a novel observation. I contrast this political threefold with Collingwood's own political threefold in The New Leviathan. I then consider the neglect of these schemes, along with the rare attempts to defend such philosophies of history in the writings of Greenleaf and Boucher. My own claim is that these philosophies of political history are exemplary: and that the threefold is, for obvious Hegelian reasons, a still useful form for this sort of reflection. Political philosophy is likely to improve the more it takes the philosophy of political history seriously. © 2016 Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.Item Open Access Three rival views of tradition (Arendt, Oakeshott and MacIntyre)(Brill, 2012) Alexander, J.If we define tradition too hastily we leave to one side the question of what the relevance of tradition is for us. Here the concept of tradition is opened up by considering the different views of it taken by Hannah Arendt, Michael Oakeshott and Alasdair MacIntyre. We see that each has put tradition into a fully developed picture of what our predicament is in modernity; and that each has differed in their assessment of what our relation to tradition is or should be. Arendt sees tradition as something which no longer conditions action, Oakeshott sees tradition as something which conditions all action, and MacIntyre sees tradition as something which should condition right action. In each case, the view of tradition is clearly one element in an attempt to see how the most important constituent elements of human existence-variously called the human condition, human conduct, or human virtue-should be understood in a modernity which is ours because it has put the traditional concept of tradition into question. © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden.