Content area
Full text
OAKESHOTT AS POSTMODERNIST Suvi Soininen: From a "Necessary Evil" to the Art of Contingency: Michael Oakeshott's Conception of Political Activity (Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, 2005. Pp. viii, 247. $49.90.)
DOI: 10.1017/S003467050700037X
This book is one in a series of monographs published by Imprint Academic Press on the thought of Michael Oakeshott. This series, which already includes seven titles, testifies to the increasing scholarly interest in Oakeshott's philosophy. There are many reasons for this growing interest, perhaps the most important being that it has become increasingly clear that Oakeshott was one of the most important political philosophers of the twentieth century. He also had many interesting and profound things to say about the nature of philosophy, history, art, religion, and education. He is generally counted as one of the most influential conservative thinkers in post-World War II Europe and America. The other thinker who springs to mind in this connection is, of course, Leo Strauss; and perhaps another reason why Oakeshott has attracted so much attention of late is that his modest and skeptical conservatism differs fundamentally from the more dogmatic and universalist conservatism of Strauss's neoconservative followers in Washington.
In Suvi Soininen's well-researched book, however, the emphasis does not fall on Oakeshott's conservatism. Indeed, she is concerned to put some distance between Oakeshott and the traditionalist, Burkean conservatism with which he is often associated and for which he has been frequently criticized. In opposition to the traditionalist, Burkean conservative, Soininen offers us an Oakeshott who has far more in common with postmodernist thinkers who emphasize the contingency of the self and of political activity in general. The thinker to whom she most closely assimilates Oakeshott is Richard Rorty.
The argument of Soininen's book centers on what she sees...