ABSTRACT
An inaugural lecture has one, if only one, agreeable traditional feature. Like a newly elected Member making his first speech in the Academic Française, a new professor pays tribute to his immediate predecessor in the chair. In the Academic Française newcomers do not always think well of their predecessors, and they make an art of being rude about them in a studiously polite way. I do not know if this situation ever arises in English universities; but I, at any rate, am in the fortunate position of wholeheartedly admiring the previous incumbent of this chair, Professor Michael Oakeshott, a true philosopher. I need hardly say at the London School of Economics what an outstanding scholar and teacher he is, or what a congenial and patient man he is to work with, but I do think it worth remembering, now that political philosophy is becoming rather a fashionable subject, that Professor Oakeshott did more than anyone else in England to keep it alive at a time when other people were saying that political philosophy was dead.
