Abstract
This essay takes up Noel Annan’s claim that “The key to Oakeshott” is in the relatively neglected book on horse racing, A Guide to the Classics. The analysis develops Oakeshott’s anti-rationalist, skeptical perspective by examining how he approached the topic of handicapping horse racing. Like politics, and practical life more generally, horse racing requires experience in the face of contingency and suggests a conservative and playful (poetic) response is the appropriate one.
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Notes
- 1.
Noel Annan, Our Age: Portrait of a Generation, (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990), 400.
- 2.
Ibid.
- 3.
Michael Oakeshott, “Work and Play” in What is History? and Other Essays, ed. Luke O’Sullivan, (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2004), 310–312.
- 4.
Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), xv; 73–74.
- 5.
Ed Smith, “What a 1930s horse racing guide by a conservative philosopher could teach sports scientists today” in New Statesman, 3 June 2017—(https://www.newstatesman.com/2017/06/what-1930s-horse-racing-guide-conservative-philosopher-could-teach-sports-scientists-today).
- 6.
Guy Griffith & Michael Oakeshott, A Guide to the Classics or How to Pick the Derby Winner, (Exeter: Amphora Press, 2017), 3–4.
- 7.
Ibid., 71–72 & 78.
- 8.
Ibid., 80–81.
- 9.
Italo Calvino, “Why Read the Classics?” in Why Read the Classics?, (London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2009), 8.
- 10.
Michael Oakeshott, Lectures in the History of Political Thought, ed. Terry Nardin and Luke O’Sullivan, (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2004), 176–178.
- 11.
Ibid., 46.
- 12.
Michael Oakeshott, The Politics of Faith & the Politics of Scepticism, ed. Timothy Fuller, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), 110–112.
- 13.
The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, ed. Ted Honderich, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 421.
- 14.
Amy Kind, “Imagination is a powerful tool: why is philosophy afraid of it?” in Aeon, 1 September 2017—(https://aeon.co/ideas/imagination-is-a-powerful-tool-why-is-philosophy-afraid-of-it).
- 15.
Guy Griffith & Michael Oakeshott, A Guide to the Classics or How to Pick the Derby Winner, x.
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Marques de Almeida, C. (2022). A Conservative Landscape: From A Guide to the Classics to the “Claims of Politics”. In: Kos, E.S. (eds) Oakeshott’s Skepticism, Politics, and Aesthetics. Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83055-7_5
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