Imprint Academic imprint: 246 books

This highly readable new collection of thirty pieces by Michael Oakeshott, almost all of which are previously unpublished, covers every decade of his intellectual career, and adds significantly to his contributions to the philosophy of historical understanding and political philosophy, as well as to...

This volume brings together for the first time over a hundred of Oakeshott’s essays and reviews, written between 1926 and 1951, that until now have remained scattered through a variety of scholarly journals, periodicals and newspapers. A new editorial introduction explains how these pieces, including...

The Vocabulary of a Modern European State is the companion volume to The Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence and completes the enterprise of gathering together Oakeshott’s previously scattered essays and reviews. As with all the other volumes in the series it contains an entirely new editorial...

This volume concentrates on the period from the beginning of the 18th century to the latter part of the 20th. It is impossible to depict a single school of philosophical theology in Scotland across three centuries, yet several strains have been identified that suggest some recurrent themes or intellectual...

Liberal education is not a theory. It is the tradition by which Western civilisation has preserved and enriched its inheritance for two and a half thousand years. Yet liberal education is a term that has fallen from use in Britain, its traditional meaning now freely confused with its opposite. This book...

The extent to which British Idealism was heavily influenced by Scots has been little noticed, yet not only were they at the forefront of introducing Hegel into Britain in the work of Ferrier, Carlyle, Hutcheson, Stirling and Edward Caird, but they were also distinctive in locating themselves in relation...

Philosophy can be very abstract and apparently remote from our everyday concerns. In this book Ralph Blumenau brings out for the non-specialist the bearing that thinkers of the past have on the way we live now, on the attitude we have towards our lives, towards each other and our society, towards God...

Christian anarchism has been around for at least as long as “secular” anarchism. Leo Tolstoy is its most famous proponent, but there are many others, such as Jacques Ellul, Vernard Eller, Dave Andrews or the people associated with the Catholic Worker movement. They offer a compelling critique of the state, the church and the economy based on the New Testament.

To call someone a reactionary is to insult them and to end any argument. There is no possible rejoinder: no one could possibly wish to be a reactionary. But what if one were to gratefully accept the label? What would it mean to wilfully and honestly be a reactionary? Referencing thinkers as diverse as...

This book argues that R.G. Collingwood’s philosophy is best understood as a diagnosis of and response to a crisis of Western civilisation. The various and complementary aspects of the crisis of civilisation are explored and Collingwood is demonstrated to be working in the traditions of Romanticism...

Michael Oakeshott (190190) made his reputation as a political philosopher, but for a long time it seemed as if he had little interest in politics before 1945. His major pre-war work, Experience and its Modes (1933) was an examination of the nature of philosophy and its relation to other forms of thought...

The Scottish Enlightenment provided the fledgling United States of America and its emerging universities with a philosophical orientation. For a hundred years or more, Scottish philosophers were both taught and emulated by professors at Princeton, Harvard and Yale, as well as newly founded colleges...

A philosopher and historian, Adam Ferguson occupies a unique place within eighteenth-century Scottish thought. Distinguished by a moral and historical bent, his work is framed within a teleological outlook that upholds the importance of action and virtue.

During the intellectual and cultural flowering of Scotland in the 18th century few subjects attracted as much interest among men of letters as aesthetics - the study of art from the subjective perspective of human experience. All of the great philosophers of the age - Hutcheson, Hume, Smith and Reid...