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Michael Oakeshott's Cold War Liberalism. Edited by Nardin Terry . New York, NY : Palgrave MacMillan , 2015. 197p. $90.00 cloth.
Book Reviews: Political Theory
Michael Oakeshott's career as a writer spanned over sixty years, yet his work in the three decades following the Second World War until the mid-1970s earned him a reputation as a political philosopher and essayist of the first order. "Rationalism in Politics" (1948), along with other essays in the eponymous collection where it was later published (1962), established Oakeshott's standing as an iconoclastic conservative to audiences beyond England; his On Human Conduct (1975) broadened this view, as Oakeshott uniquely explores the theoretical and historical foundations of something like a liberal constitutional state. Of course this period also covers the bulk of the Cold War, and the essays collected in Michael Oakeshott's Cold War Liberalism attempt to situate his work in light of that period of significant ideological and political conflict. The difficulty is that Oakeshott was notoriously elusive regarding contemporary political matters. He neither made many dramatic or explicit statements about, say, Soviet communism, nor did he engage in ideological battles with the like-minded over who better protected, or more threatened, freedom. Thus, in Michael Oakeshott's Cold War Liberalism the various writers reinterpret Oakeshott's work by positioning it in relation not just to the Cold War, but into conversation with Cold War liberals such as Isaiah Berlin, Raymond Aron, Karl Popper, and Friedrich Hayek. The authors also consider how capable his work is in addressing post-Cold War theoretical and political issues.
The collection is organized into three parts. The first takes up the question of the possibility of understanding Oakeshott in the liberal/conservative framework so significant in Cold War politics. The second examines Oakeshott's contributions to the great debates about the character and threats of totalitarianism, particularly important to Cold War liberals. The third part considers the applicability of Oakeshott's ideas in the context of contemporary East Asian politics. This third section is potentially...