The Love of Learning
Michael Oakeshott and Colorado College
By TIMOTHY FULLERDean of the College
ichael Oakeshott will, I think, prove to be the most important British political philosopher of the 20th century. His work will be seen in the future to be the continuation of the tradition of British essay writing on philosophy and politics we associate with Francis Bacon, David Hume, Lord Macaulay and John Stuart Mill. He is unquestionably the most remarkable person I have had the privilege to know.
His connection to Colorado College began in 1974 when he accepted my invitation (I was in charge of the academic part of the college's centennial celebration) to give the Abbott Memorial Lecture in the Social Sciences. He presented his lecture, "A Place of Learning," in September, inaugurating a year-long series of lectures on the present and future state of liberal learning. He delivered his lecture to 400 people crowded into the Tutt Library Atrium. This lecture has become widely known. It was first published as a special issue of The Colorado College Studies in 1975, reprinted several times in journals, finally to become the lead essay in a collection of his essays on education, "The Voice of Liberal Learning," which I edited for the Yale University Press and which was published in 1989. This book has been widely used in philosophy of education courses and in seminars on Oakeshott's thought ever since.
"The Voice of Liberal Learning" was a considerable success. First, because of its eloquent evocation and defense of liberal learning. Second, because Oakeshott's was a new voice in a debate that had been raging in America since 1987 when Allan Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students," and E.D. Hirsch's "Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know" became best sellers, indicting American education for failures they insisted were tantamount to the degradation of Western Civilization. This debate over education continues to this very day and there are now many new and contradictory voices to be heard. But at that moment in 1989, and still, Oakeshott offers a more detached and considered perspective without necessarily denying validity to many of the complaints expressed by Bloom, Hirsch and others.
Oakeshott's subtler analysis was deeply informed by the history of education in the west. Oakeshott knew that our great debates were new versions of issues that had flared up in past eras. He was quite convinced that there was a permanent meaning to liberal learning, but he also recognized that there is no time when it is not under threat, especially from those who make no effort to understand it, and that there have indeed been times in the past when the threat was greater. Without minimizing the dangers, Oakeshott argued that the greatest safeguard for liberal learning is to have a clear idea of what it is about so as not to be distracted by immediate fashion and self-appointed prophets.
Oakeshott urged his listeners at Colorado College, and his subsequent readers, to recover a clear vision of the character of learning and teaching. Education for Oakeshott reached its height in the unrehearsed intellectual adventure he called the "conversation of mankind." Oakeshott was himself a genuine conversationalist: not argumentative, not hortatory, not put off by the meandering, sometimes startling, ways conversation takes. Those who knew him will say that he was first and foremost a great teacher. He, on the other hand, always thought of himself, first, as a learner. Many graduates of CC discovered this when they studied in the History of Political Thought program he founded at LSE, and many of them have gone on to become teachers in leading American colleges and universities.
Oakeshott recognized that people have many motives for seeking an education, but he insisted that if they never experienced the joy of learning for its own sake, they would remain educationally incomplete. Conversation among those of differing disciplines and academic pursuits, he believed, is one of the greatest opportunities to have this experience, which begins for the entering students when they find themselves immersed in conversations that have long preceded them and to which they must learn to add their individual voices, thereby absorbing an inheritance, while, at the same time, making it their own, and altering it by their own contribution.
After his Abbott lecture, Oakeshott spent a week at the college meeting with faculty and students, and thus began both our friendship, which was to last until his death at 89, in 1990, and his fondness for Colorado College, which was deeply felt. He thought that Colorado College exemplified what he meant by a place of learning. Oakeshott's second visit was in 1982 when he received an honorary degree. Oakeshott was known to reject offers of honorary degrees so his acceptance of ours was a special statement of his attachment to Colorado College.
I had known Oakeshott's work since I was an undergraduate but I had not met him before he arrived in Colorado Springs in September 1974. In the course of our time together, I asked him why he had accepted my invitation. He said two things had prompted him, apart from the nature of the occasion itself: First, his uncle had come to California early in the century to grow tomatoes and that had inspired him to begin reading stories of the American West, of which Oakeshott had a very romantic idea; second, he was charmed by the thought of pioneers crossing the plains in covered wagons, carrying copies of Shakespeare and the Bible, to found a college of liberal learning at the foot of Pike's Peak. When he said in his Abbott Lecture that he had traveled half way around the world only to find himself in familiar surroundings - a place of liberal learning - he was speaking in earnest.
During that visit, I also took him to Cripple Creek where we clambered about the gold mines and had a beer together at the bar of the Imperial Hotel. He was thrilled to see cowboys on horses punching cows. As far as he was concerned, all he had imagined was made manifest before his eyes.
Oakeshott was the author of many books which have established places in contemporary political thought. Among them are "Experience and its Modes" (1933), "Rationalism in Politics" (1962), and "On Human Conduct" (1975). After his death, Shirley Letwin (one of his major interpreters and herself a frequent visitor to CC) and I retrieved his papers from his country cottage on the southern coast of England and brought them back to London. In his will he left his papers to her to do with as she thought best. What we found was a vast array of unpublished essays, some of book length. The quantity of unpublished writing equalled the published. For now, the papers are housed in the Letwin's house in London, but eventually they will go to the archives of The London Schoolof Economics.
Following the success of "The Voice of Liberal Learning," Yale agreed to publish The Selected Works of Michael Oakeshott, and Shirley Letwin and I became co-editors of the series. Three volumes have appeared since "The Voice of Liberal Learning": "Religion, Politics and the Moral Life" (1993), "Morality and Politics in Modern Europe, The Harvard Lectures" (1993), and "The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism" (1996). In addition, a new and expanded edition of "Rationalism in Politics" (1991) was published by the Liberty Fund Press.
Shirley Letwin died in 1993 and since then I have carried on the project with advice from William Letwin, Shirley's husband, and emeritus professor at the LSE, and Professor Kenneth Minogue of the LSE. Both have also been frequent visitors to CC.
Michael Oakeshott was a part of Colorado College in a special way. He praised CC and other places of liberal learning that, for centuries, "have with becoming humility, summoned succeeding generations to the enjoyment of their human inheritance." Education, he said, "is a transaction between teachers and learners. And a man is what he learns to become: this is the human condition."