Book Note: Michael Oakeshott's Skepticism

Admirers of the writing of Michael Oakeshott may want to read Aryeh Botwinick's new book, Michael Oakeshott's Skepticism.  I am not an Oakeshott scholar (though I have more than a passing interest in his philosophy of education), but still I am uncertain about some of the conclusions that Botwinick reaches: e.g., that Oakeshott is a "political philosophical liberal," defined as "someone who calls into question the claims to authority and knowledge advanced by devotees of both Revelation and Reason."  Is John Rawls a political philosophical liberal, too, on this definition?  Botwinick at one point says that Oakeshott's conception of "conversation" "can also be related to his political theory proper in ways that are evocative of Rawls, Ackerman, and Hobbes."  (138)  Really?  Given Oakeshott's deep interest in Hobbes, that connection makes sense to me, but I am more doubtful about the link to Rawls, let alone Ackerman.  This seems to me a quite liberal reading of Oakeshott's conception of conversation. 

Nevertheless, the book is insightful and interesting on the subject of Oakeshott and religion.  Oakeshott is not known as a religious thinker and much of his work did not explicitly concern religious subjects (some of his early work did, but he moved away from it in his mature writing).  But Botwinick argues that Oakeshott's ethic of skepticism gave rise to a type of mysticism which he claims is evocative of Pascal, St. Anselm, and Nicholas of Cusa.  A bit:

According to Oakeshott, we are not able to pierce through to the governing factors as to why the customs, habits, and traditions that we adhere to have the structures and contents that they do . . . . 'Tradition' on one definitional level serves as a surrogate for Revelation.  It is what Revelation gets deflated into once the logical conundrums surrounding the idea of God are confronted . . . . Tradition itself, however, partakes of the inscrutability of its mysterious source in exactly the way that Nicholas projects: it irradiates us -- but we cannot unmask it as long as we continue to relate to it as tradition.  (97)