Abstract

Franco’s book is meticulous and objective, but it does underline two points. The first is that Oakeshott cannot be portrayed simply as a “conservative”; thus T. S. Eliot was a more typical conservative than Oakeshott, the latter being rather a conservative Whig, in the tradition of Edmund Burke and Sir Robert Peel. The second is that throughout his life, Oakeshott, far from being an agnostic and religious indifferentist, interacted with religious theories and responded to them, even though this is not always visible in his published writings.