[4] Though there is no evidence that he knew her, he was related by marriage to the women's rights activist Grace Oakeshott,[6] and to the economist and social reformer Gilbert Slater.

As a University of Cambridge student, he admired the British idealist philosophers J. M. E. McTaggart and John Grote, and the medieval historian Zachary Nugent Brooke.

In between, he taught literature for a year as Senior English Master at King Edward VII Grammar School, Lytham, while simultaneously writing his fellowship dissertation, which he said was a 'dry run' for his first book, Experience and its Modes.

Oakeshott was dismayed by the political extremism that occurred in Europe during the 1930s, and his surviving lectures from this period reveal a dislike of Nazism and Marxism.

For all its muddle and incoherence, as Oakeshott saw it, he found representative democracy the least unsatisfactory, in part because "the imposition of a universal plan of life on a society is at once stupid and immoral."

Oakeshott was deeply unsympathetic to the student activism at LSE during the late 1960s, and highly critical of what he saw as the authorities' insufficiently robust response.

Some of his very early essays are on religion (of a Christian 'modernist' kind), though after his first marital break-up (c. 1934) he published no more on the topic except for a couple of pages in his magnum opus, titled On Human Conduct.

At this stage of his career Oakeshott understood philosophy as the world seen, in Spinoza's phrase, sub specie aeternitatis, literally "under the aspect of eternity", free from presuppositions, whereas science and history and the practical mode rely on certain assumptions.

Later (there is disagreement about exactly when) Oakeshott adopted a pluralistic view of the various modes of experience, with philosophy just one voice among others, though it retained its self-critical character.

Because all action is conditioned by presuppositions, Oakeshott saw any attempt to change the world as reliant upon a scale of values, which themselves presuppose a context in which this is preferable to that.

During this period, Oakeshott published what became his best known work during his lifetime, the collection entitled Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (1962), and notable for its elegance of style.

Some of his near-polemics against the direction that Britain was taking, in particular towards socialism, gained Oakeshott a reputation as a traditionalist conservative, sceptical about rationalism and rigid ideologies.

[16] Oakeshott's opposition to political utopianism is summed up in his analogy (possibly borrowed from a pamphlet by the 17th-century statesman George Savile, 1st Marquess of Halifax, The Character of a Trimmer) of a ship of state that has "neither starting-place nor appointed destination...[and where] the enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel".

In the first, which he calls "enterprise association" (or universitas), the state is (illegitimately) understood as imposing some universal purpose (profit, salvation, progress, racial domination) on its subjects.

Oakeshott, who rarely responded to critics, replied sardonically in Political Theory to some of the contributions made in a symposium on the book in the same journal.

The Politics of Scepticism, on the other hand, rests on the idea that government should concern itself with preventing bad things from happening, rather than enabling ambiguously good events.

It also includes a retelling of The Tower of Babel in a modern setting[21] in which Oakeshott expresses disdain for human willingness to sacrifice individuality, culture, and quality of life for grand collective projects.

It consisted of selected texts illustrating the main doctrines of liberalism, national socialism, fascism, communism, and Roman Catholicism (1939).

Further volumes of posthumous writings are in preparation, as is a biography, and a series of monographs devoted to his work were published during the first decade of the 21st century, and continue to be produced.