Martyn P. Thompsons book will surely stand as one of the most incisive and compelling defenses of the autonomy of historical experience and historical explanation in recent years. He has also made a convincing case that Michael Oakeshott should be considered the pre-eminent philosopher of history in the 20th century. He has accomplished both of these while also offering an insightful examination of the strengths and a trenchant critique of the weaknesses of the Cambridge School of intellectual history.
Kenneth B. McIntyre, Associate Professor, Sam Houston State University, USA, and author of The Limits of Political Theory: Oakeshotts Philosophy of Civil Association
The publication of Martyn P. Thompsons new book on Michael Oakeshott has been keenly awaited by historians of political thought, as well as by Oakeshott specialists. I am sure they will find his lucid and provocative study well worth the wait.
Richard F. Teichgraeber III, Tulane University, USA
Michael Oakeshott and the Cambridge School on the History of Political Thought
This book is a critique of Cambridge School Historical Contextualism as the currently dominant mode of history of political thought, drawing upon Michael Oakeshotts analysis of the logic of historical enquiry.
While acknowledging that the early Cambridge School work represented a considerable advance towards genuinely historical histories of political thought, this work identifies two major historiographical problems that have become increasingly acute. The first is general: an insufficiently rigorous understanding of the key concept of pastness necessarily presupposed in historical enquiry of all kinds. The second is specific to histories of political thought: a failure to do justice to the varieties of past political thinking, especially differences between ideology and philosophy. In addressing these problems, the author offers a comprehensive account of the history of political thought that establishes the parameters not just of histories of ideological thinking but also of the much disputed character of histories of political philosophy. Since rethinking history of political thought in Oakeshottian terms requires resisting current pressures to turn history into the servant of currently felt needs, the book offers a sustained defence of the cultural value of modernist historical enquiry against its opponents.
An important work for political theorists, historians of political thought and those researching intellectual history, the philosophy of history and proposed new directions in contemporary historical studies.
Martyn P. Thompson is Associate Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Political Science at Tulane University, USA.
First published 2019
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ISBN: 978-1-138-21555-9 (hbk)
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Martyn P. Thompson is Associate Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Political Science at Tulane University, USA. His main fields of research and publication are the history of political thought since the Renaissance, literature and politics and contemporary German political theory. He was formerly Professor of English Literature and Intellectual History at Tbingen University, Germany where his research and publications focused on English political and satirical literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as well as German theories of literary history.
Professor Thompson has two doctorates, the first a Ph.D. in the history of political thought from the London School of Economics, the second (the Habilitation) in English literature and cultural history from Tbingen University. He has been a faculty member in the universities of London, Tbingen, Cambridge and Tulane. His honors include a Fellow Commonership (now a By-Fellowship) at Churchill College, Cambridge University; Fellowships at the Huntington Library and the William Andrews Clark Library in California; and honorary life memberships of the R.G. Collingwood Society and the Michael Oakeshott Association.
His publications include: Ideas of Contract in English Political Thought in the Age of John Locke (1987); an edited volume, Locke and Kant: Historical Reception and Contemporary Relevance (1991); and many book chapters and articles in major journals including the American Historical Review, Political Studies, Political Theory, Historical Journal, Journal of the History of Ideas, and History and Theory. He has been co-editor and contributor to the annual Politisches Denken Jahrbuch from its inaugural edition in 1991 to the present.
This relatively short book has been very long in the making. My argument is based on four, more or less controversial, observations. First, during and after the seventeenth century, a new attitude towards the study of the past emerged in Western cultures, an attitude that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries became widely recognized as a quintessentially historical attitude. This was the determination no longer to study the past in order to discover insights or lessons for present and future conduct. It was rather to explain the past, as the saying goes, in its own past terms. In other words, it was the determination (methodical, disciplined and unwavering) to reconstruct and explain past occurrences in terms of their specific, particular, concrete, unrepeatable and irrevocable pastness. Second, the most comprehensive, critical analysis of the logic of this new, historical attitude was Michael Oakeshotts. His analysis centered on a categorical distinction between the new concerns with genuinely past historical pasts as opposed to the much older concerns that dominated the rest of the long history of historiography with various kinds of still living practical pasts. Third, the studies of past political thinking that exhibit most closely Oakeshotts conception of the logic of genuinely historical understanding are those written by historians associated with, or by historians writing in the same vein as, the Cambridge School of intellectual history. But fourth, the tension between old-style history with its focus on practical pasts and new-style history with its focus on historical pasts has never been settled. In recent decades, the proponents of old-style history have gained significant ground, not only within the historical profession itself (including some practitioners of Cambridge-style history) but also among many of its postmodern critics. My argument questions the wisdom of this hasty retreat and arguably ill-considered return to pre-modern days and ways.
