ABSTRACT
I now turn to a direct engagement with Oakeshott’s own writings. His first published works were essays on religion and morality. These, together with practical experience, are dealt with in the next chapter. Here I set out Oakeshott’s radical restatement of Idealist metaphysics as it is presented in EM. I wish to put forward the view that this first substantive philosophical text sets his work on nonfoundational territory. That this has not been fully explored may be due to the lack of analysis of how Bradley’s thought played out in his work. By putting forward this interpretation I also imply that Oakeshott’s work should not be read ‘politically’, that he is not to be taken as a ‘liberal’ thinker nor understood in the ‘conservative’ tradition. Rather, what he achieves in EM is a re-interpretation of Idealism that sets its philosophical principles upon a contemporary theoretical terrain. Oakeshott’s radical move was to fully equate Bradley’s ‘Absolute’ with ‘experience’, and bring this together with Hegel’s idea that it is the totality of consciousness, to rewrite Idealism in non-foundational terms. Oakeshott uses the ‘concrete universal’ as a non-essentialist theoretical concept that is designed to help take philosophy ‘beyond objectivism without falling into subjectivism’. By bringing Bradley’s ‘unknowable’ reality into human cognition, Oakeshott places the emphasis on the understanding of the ‘modes’ of experience. Most of EM is given over to an analysis of the presuppositions of the modes of science, history and practice.1
