Abstract
Leo Strauss’s discussion of the role of death in the political philosophy of Hobbes informed Michael Oakeshott’s understanding of what he called “life from the standpoint of death.” Strauss had explained to friends that his work on Hobbes had been conceived with an emphasis on the “deep connection” between Hobbes and Hegel, an aspect of his study which was sharpened by discussions with Alexandre Kojève. This implies the indirect influence of Kojève on Oakeshott and McIlwain uses this context to construct a unique comparison of Kojève and Oakeshott, clarifying the premodern and religious elements in Oakeshott’s description of a poetic self in setting this against Kojève’s universal and homogeneous state. The comparison is developed in terms of Kojève’s Japanese “snob” and Oakeshott’s mode of poetry.
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Notes
- 1.
Efraim Podoksik, “The Voice of Poetry in the Thought of Michael Oakeshott,” Journal of the History of Ideas 63, no. 4 (October 2002): 731–732.
- 2.
Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, ed. Timothy Fuller (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1991), xi; Michael Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933), 296.
- 3.
Michael Oakeshott, On Human Conduct (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 84.
- 4.
Alexandre Kojève, “The Idea of Death in the Philosophy of Hegel,” trans. Joseph J. Carpino Interpretation 3, no. 2/3 (1973): 124.
- 5.
Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes, 10.
- 6.
Ibid., 196.
- 7.
Michael Oakeshott, “Review of N. Berdyaev, The Meaning of History (1936),” in The Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence: Essays and Reviews 1926–51, Selected Writings, Volume III, ed. Luke O’Sullivan (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2007), 137.
- 8.
Stanley Rosen, G. W. F. Hegel: An Introduction to the Science of Wisdom (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2000), 221–222.
- 9.
Michael Oakeshott, “Introduction to Leviathan,” in Hobbes on Civil Association (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000), 61–62.
- 10.
Wendell John Coats Jr., Oakeshott and His Contemporaries: Montaigne, St. Augustine, Hegel, Et al (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 2000), 42.
- 11.
Michael Oakeshott, “The Importance of the Historical Element in Christianity,” in Religion, Politics and the Moral Life, ed. Timothy Fuller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 69.
- 12.
Michael Oakeshott, “Dr. Leo Strauss on Hobbes,” in Hobbes on Civil Association, 157.
- 13.
Paul Franco, introduction to Oakeshott, Hobbes on Civil Association, ix.
- 14.
Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis, trans. Elsa M. Sinclair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 161.
- 15.
Oakeshott, “Introduction to Leviathan,” 62.
- 16.
Michael Oakeshott, “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind,” Rationalism in Politics, 540–541.
- 17.
Oakeshott, On Human Conduct, 84.
- 18.
Stanley Rosen, Hermeneutics as Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 106.
- 19.
Oakeshott, “Voice of Poetry,” 488.
- 20.
While “demotion” denotes a hierarchy foreign to the “conversation of mankind,” the polemical dichotomy of Rationalism and Politics is already suggestive of the final priority of a poetic religion in On Human Conduct.
- 21.
Oakeshott, “Voice of Poetry,” 530–532.
- 22.
Ibid., 539.
- 23.
Elizabeth Campbell Corey, Michael Oakeshott on Religion, Aesthetics, and Politics (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006), 120.
- 24.
Michael Oakeshott, “On Being Conservative,” in Rationalism in Politics, 417.
- 25.
Michael Oakeshott, “Work and Play,” in What is History? and other essays, Selected Writings, Volume I, ed. Luke O’Sullivan (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2004), 313.
- 26.
Oakeshott, “Voice of Poetry,” 516 n. 13.
- 27.
Oakeshott, “Work and Play,” 312.
- 28.
Oakeshott, “Voice of Poetry,” 527.
- 29.
Michael Oakeshott, “Review of R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (1938),” in The Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence, 184–186.
- 30.
Cited in Podoksik, “Voice of Poetry in the Thought of Michael Oakeshott,” 722.
- 31.
Corey, Michael Oakeshott on Religion, Aesthetics, and Politics, 104–105.
- 32.
For a similar example, see Paul Franco, Michael Oakeshott: An Introduction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 131.
- 33.
Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, ed. Allan Bloom and trans. James H. Nichols (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 158–159 n. 6.
- 34.
Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 41.
- 35.
Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 159 n. 6. “Next to the Japanese,” Kojève would quip in an interview, “English high society is a bunch of drunken sailors.” Quoted in J. H. Nichols, Alexandre Kojève: Wisdom at the End of History (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007), 85.
- 36.
“…was Nietzsche not right in describing the Hegelian-Marxian end as ‘the last man’?” Leo Strauss, Letter to Alexandre Kojève, September 11, 1957, in On Tyranny: Corrected and Expanded Edition, Including the Strauss-Kojève Correspondence, ed. Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 291.
- 37.
Kojève, “Death in the Philosophy of Hegel,” 141.
- 38.
Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 161–162 n. 6.
- 39.
John Adams Wettergreen Jr., “Is Snobbery a Formal Value? Considering Life at the End of Modernity,” Western Political Quarterly 26, no. 1 (March 1973): 128.
- 40.
Robert Howse and Bryan-Paul Frost, “Introductory Essay: On the Plausibility of the Universal and Homogenous State,” in Alexandre Kojève, Outline of a Phenomenology of Right, ed. Bryan-Paul Frost and trans. Bryan-Paul Frost and Robert Howse (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 3.
- 41.
Kojève, “Idea of Death in the Philosophy of Hegel,” 141.
- 42.
This brilliant clarity also brings to light a telling inconsistency as Victor Gourevitch notices “Kojève’s failure to explain satisfactorily why Hegel couched this [atheistic] part of his teaching in equivocal, i.e., esoteric terms.” Victor Gourevitch, “Philosophy and Politics, II” The Review of Metaphysics 22, no. 2 (December 1968), 298 n. 2.
- 43.
Oakeshott cites Strauss’s The Political Philosophy of Hobbes at page 16. Michael Oakeshott, Notebooks, 1922–86, Selected Writings, Volume VI, ed. Luke O’Sullivan (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2014), 287.
- 44.
Letter to Hans-Georg Gadamer and Gerhard Krüger, May 12, 1935, in Leo Strauss, Hobbes’s Critique of Religion and Related Writings, trans. Gabriel Bartlett and Svetozar Minkov (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 161.
- 45.
Michael Oakeshott, “Letter on Hobbes,” Political Theory 29, no. 6 (December 2001): 834.
- 46.
Corey, Michael Oakeshott on Religion, Aesthetics, and Politics, 94.
- 47.
G. W. F. Hegel, Outlines of a Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox and ed. Stephen Houlgate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 306, 308.
- 48.
Steven B. Smith, Hegel’s Critique of Liberalism: Rights in Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 159.
- 49.
Michael Oakeshott, “The Political Economy of Freedom,” in Rationalism in Politics, 404.
- 50.
Oakeshott, “Voice of Poetry,” 493–494 n. 2.
- 51.
Michael Oakeshott, “The Moral Life in the Writings of Thomas Hobbes,” in Hobbes on Civil Association, 140.
- 52.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (London: Penguin, 1985), XXI, 269.
- 53.
Jan-Werner Müller, “Re-imagining Leviathan: Schmitt and Oakeshott on Hobbes and the problem of political order,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 13, nos. 2–3 (2010): 324.
- 54.
Oakeshott, “Moral Life in the Writings of Thomas Hobbes,” 128.
- 55.
Oakeshott, On Human Conduct, 238.
- 56.
Ibid., 183.
- 57.
Strauss, On Tyranny, 209. It is worth noting the degree to which Strauss’s position has been misrepresented on this point. Despite his clear preference for the theoretical man and his reminder that the most theoretical of men belonged among the anthropoi, one of Strauss’s critics resorts to mocking “[t]iny little men with rounded shoulders” and “[l]arger, softer men, with soft white hands which had never held a gun or changed a tire” who yet dared to celebrate manliness. Only a few pages on, this critic reveals why Strauss could never live up to her ideal of masculinity in the example of her “friends” who have been “too tall, too strong, and too black” for society to handle. Anne Norton, Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 63, 70.
- 58.
Oakeshott, On Human Conduct, 241.
- 59.
Michael Oakeshott, The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism, ed. Timothy Fuller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 110.
- 60.
Andrew Sullivan, Intimations Pursued: The Voice of Practice in the Conversation of Michael Oakeshott (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2007), 178.
- 61.
Podoksik, “Voice of Poetry in the Thought of Michael Oakeshott,” 732. Oakeshott blurred the lines between mortality, poetry, and divinity in such a way that substantial ambiguities will always remain in his worldview.
- 62.
Oakeshott, On Human Conduct, 81.
- 63.
Terry Nardin, The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott (University Park: State University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 67.
- 64.
Corey, Michael Oakeshott on Religion, Aesthetics, and Politics, 118.
- 65.
Oakeshott, On Human Conduct, 83.
- 66.
Ibid., 41.
- 67.
Michael Oakeshott, “The Tower of Babel,” in Rationalism in Politics, 479.
- 68.
Oakeshott, “Voice of Poetry,” 507–508.
- 69.
Ibid., 494, 492.
- 70.
Ibid., 493.
- 71.
Cited in Howse and Frost, “Introductory Essay,” 27.
- 72.
Oakeshott, Notebooks, 331.
- 73.
Cited in Rosen, Hermeneutics as Politics, 106.
- 74.
Sullivan, Intimations Pursued, 201.
- 75.
Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes, 292.
- 76.
Leo Strauss, Socrates and Aristophanes (New York: Basic Books, 1966), 33.
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McIlwain, D. (2019). Michael Oakeshott and Alexandre Kojève on Play and Practice. In: Michael Oakeshott and Leo Strauss. Recovering Political Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13381-8_7
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