Styles ... needed updating. Fierce.Just when you were getting over the fashionable conservative, AS dishes up the occasional conservative.
Flippancy aside, I'm actually interested in reading his thesis on Oakeshott.
I would be interested to find out why "liberalism" is universally equated with "rationalism" and how that juncture makes Oakeshott's politics necessarily "conservative" (as I've said before here, it would be astonishing to find that practical wisdom was the sole province of Conservatives, somehow).
What's really funny is how AS gets this totally backwards (ignoring how hopelessly Western a conception it is, that change is "episodic" or "occasional"):
Occasionally, liberalism was needed - not for too long, but sometimes as an agent of change, or as a respite from corruption and degeneracy elsewhere.
Not funny, you say? Well, for the humor, compare it to that quote AS often uses to describe Maggie Thatcher, who had to attack the rot that had set in, like Hercules through the Augean stables. In that context, it is "conservatism", specifically free-market conservatism, that has its episodes, right?
