The Economist Letters to the Editor Jun 14th 2014 A liberal’s evolution SIR – Your review of Edmund Fawcett’s “Liberalism” found it “odd” that the book places Michael Oakeshott, a British Conservative, “in the same tent” as Jean-Paul Sartre, a French Marxist (“On the barricades”, May 24th). But the common link between them was an unwavering commitment to individual freedom that transcended party (though Oakeshott in later life did sometimes make disparaging remarks about Sartre). Oakeshott was born the son of a prominent Fabian, Joseph Oakeshott (who had helped the Webbs set up the London School of Economics) and began his own intellectual career as a socialist of a rather Romantic, non-Marxist sort. Despite his later hostility to the central planning espoused by the post-1945 Labour government, he retained many of the underlying values that had first drawn him to the left. In old age Oakeshott made complimentary remarks about another prominent figure for the French left, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, of “property is theft” fame. In “On Human Conduct” (1975), he explicitly endorsed Proudhon’s aim of finding “a condition of social equality which is neither community, nor despotism, nor atomisation, nor disorder, but freedom in order and independence in unity” as “not a bad specification of the civil condition”, his own term for a liberal order. Ideological labels sometimes conceal far deeper affinities. Luke O’Sullivan General editor Selected writings of Michael Oakeshott Singapore
Posted on: Wed, 17 Sep 2014 03:18:08 +0000