ABSTRACT
The single idea running like a bright thread throughout the long and distinguished career of Michael Oakeshott has been his insistence – bordering on a categorical imperative – on the distinction between theory and practice. From Experience and its Modes where he declared philosophy to be the quest for ‘experience without presupposition, reservation, arrest, or modification’ to On Human Conduct where he described the philosopher’s task as the attempt to theorize the ‘postulates’ of human activity, Oakeshott has resisted the reduction of philosophy to the practical necessities of life (1966, 2, 347, 1975, 9-12). The task of philosophy, as Oakeshott might have said, is not to change the world but to interpret it. The question is whether Oakeshott’s insistence on the ‘autonomy’ of theory is plausible. Nardin (2015) believes that it is. I am more sceptical.
