Michael Oakeshott Bibliography Updated
The Michael Oakeshott community owes a large debt of gratitude to Efraim Podoksik for performing another update of the Michael Oakeshott Bibliography.
The April 2009 version of the Bibliography can now be obtained in either Acrobat PDF format or compressed MS Word format from the Bibliography page.
2009 Conference: Call for Papers Extended until 15 May
Abstracts for this November’s MOA Conference at Baylor University, Texas, can now be submitted until 15 May 2009.
For more information, see the Conference Page.
Oakeshott and the Universities 1949
The Time magazine archive discloses a few of Oakeshott’s (amongst other people’s) thoughts from 1949 on the problem facing universities.
Recent posts by Leslie Marsh
Over at his blog Man Without Qualities, Leslie Marsh has recently posted a couple of Oakeshott curiosities. One is a link to Time magazine’s 1950 story about Oakeshott’s appointment to the LSE, which it seems is now online along with the magazine’s entire archive.
Philosospher of Conversation
Leslie’s other recent Oakeshott post was Philosopher of Conversation, about The Spectator’s anonymous eponymously-titled profile of Oakeshott.
Leslie says he suspects that the author of the piece was John Casey. In fact, I think there can be very little doubt about the matter. Oakeshott himself believed Casey to be the author, as he revealed in a letter to Peter Coleman which Coleman subsequently quoted in his obituary for Oakeshott. And Casey himself pretty much gave the game away in his non-anonymous review of Robert Grant’s book Oakeshott for the Times Literary Supplement (29 March, 1991), recycling anecdotes and turns of phrase from the earlier piece.
One of the amusing highlights of both pieces is the tale of the Cambridge don who, shortly after Margaret Thatcher obtained the leadership of Britain’s Conservative Party, lobbied her to accord Oakeshott some public honour — only to have her confuse Michael with some other academic named Oakeshott. In the anonymous Spectator article the don was unnamed; in the later review Casey outed himself as the don in question.
Why you must login to comment
Over at the blog Single World of Ideas there is a follow-up post to my discussion of Ken McIntyre and that blog’s views on posthumous Oakeshott publications.
The author mentions that he (or she) attempted to post the rejoinder as a comment on the MOA site, but abandoned the attempt when confronted by the login screen.
As it happens, my relatively restrictive comment policy is something I have been in two minds about. Web industry wisdom (backed by a reasonable volume of usability research) holds that the more steps you add to a procedure, the fewer will be the people who bother to complete it. Given the total absence of comments on the MOA site, even before our early-2008 meltdown, I have often wondered whether I might be setting the bar too high in confining comments to users who are both registered and logged-in.
So in early 2009 I tried a little experiment; I quietly relaxed the comment policy, so that someone only had to provide a valid email address in order to post a comment (as they can on, e.g. Andrew Norton’s blog). The result was nothing but a massive spam attack. Fortunately, I had selected the option to hold for moderation all comments containing links, so very few of the spam comments actually saw the light of day on the site. But since the spam was literally coming in faster than I could remove it, I reluctantly reverted to the original, more restrictive policy.
Much as I would like to see multiple voices create a conversation on this site, soliloquies are better than spam.