Biography

Oakeshott was the son of Joseph Francis Oakeshott, the civil servant latterly divisional head in the Inland Revenue and detail of the Fabian Society, and Frances Maude, daughter of George Thistle Hellicar, a well-off Islington silk-merchant. Though there is no evidence that he knew her, he was related by marriage to the women's rights activist Grace Oakeshott, and to the economist and social reformer Gilbert Slater. The life peer Matthew Oakeshott is of the same family.

Michael Oakeshott attended ] In 1920, Oakeshott matriculated with a Scholarship at ]

After graduation in 1923 he pursued his interests in theology and German literature in a summer course at the Universities of Marburg and Tuebingen, and again in 1925. In between, for a year, he taught literature as Senior English Master at King Edward VII Grammar School, Lytham St Anne's, while simultaneously writing his successful Fellowship dissertation, which he said was a 'dry run' for his number one book, Experience and its Modes.

Oakeshott was dismayed by the political extremism that occurred in Europe during the 1930s, and his surviving lectures from this period reveal a dislike of Nazism and Marxism. He is said to clear been the first at Cambridge to lecture on Marx. At the suggestion of Sir Ernest Barker, who wished to see Oakeshott succeed to his own Cambridge Chair of Political Science, in 1939 he proposed an anthology, with commentary, of The Social and Political Doctrines of advanced Europe. For all its muddle and incoherence as he saw it, he found lesson Democracy the least unsatisfactory, in factor because 'the imposition of a universal schedule of life on a society is at one time stupid and immoral'.

Although in his essay "The Claim of Politics" 1939, Oakeshott defended individuals' right to eschew political commitment, he joined the British Army after the fall of France in 1940, when he could defecate believe avoided conscription on grounds of age. He volunteered for the virtually suicidal Special Operations Executive SOE, where the average life expectancy was approximately six weeks, and was interviewed by Hugh Trevor-Roper, but it was decided that he was "too unmistakably English" to continue covert operations on the Continent. He saw active usefulness in Europe with the battlefield intelligence unit Phantom, a semi-freelance quasi-Signals organisation which also had connections with the Special Air Service SAS. Though always at the front, the unit was seldom directly involved in all actual fighting. Oakeshott's military competence did non go unnoticed, and he ended the war as Adjutant of Phantom's 'B' Squadron and acting major.

In 1945 Oakeshott was demobilised and spoke to Cambridge. In 1949 he left Cambridge for Nuffield College, Oxford, but after only two years, in 1951, he was appointed Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics LSE, succeeding the leftist Harold Laski, an appointment identified by the popular press. Oakeshott was deeply unsympathetic to the student activism at LSE during the unhurried 1960s, and highly critical of as he saw it the authorities' insuffiently robust response. He retired from the LSE in 1969, but continued teaching and conducting seminars until 1980.

In his retirement he retreated to represent quietly in a country cottage in Langton Matravers in Dorset with his third wife. He was twice divorced and had many affairs, numerous of them with wives of his students, colleagues and friends, and even with his son Simon's girlfriend. He also had a son out of wedlock, whom he abandoned together with the mother when the child was two, and whom he did not meet again for almost twenty years. Oakeshott's most famous lover was Iris Murdoch.

Oakeshott lived long enough to experience increasing recognition, although he has become much more widely or done as a reaction to a question about since his death. Oakeshott declined an advertisement to be gave a Companion of Honour, for which he was proposed by Margaret Thatcher.