Michael Oakeshott's political philosophy of International Relations

‘In political activity, then, men sail a boundless and bottomless sea: there is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-place nor appointed destination. The enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel; the sea is both friend and enemy: and the seamanship consists in using the resources of a traditional manner of behaviour in order to make a friend of every hostile occasion.’ Thus Michael Oakeshott's famous and compelling extended poetic metaphor describes the scope and substance of political activity (Rationalism in politics and other essays, p. 127). And it applies to the state's international journey as much as it does to the scope and substance of domestic political activity. As Terry Nardin perceptively remarked in his exemplary analysis The philosophy of Michael Oakeshott (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001) Oakeshott ‘was a remarkably independent person—a teacher and theorist who shunned honors and notoriety, seldom cited the work of other scholars and persisted in working out his own ideas and formulating them in his own terms instead of entering the terms of current debate’ (p. vii). This partly explains why interest in the relevance of Oakeshott's political reflection to the study of international theory has only quickened since his death; indeed, a variety of scholars have addressed the matter, inter alia Nardin himself, Alexander Astrov, Nicholas Rengger, Robert Jackson, Maurice Keens-Soper, Mervyn Frost, Cornelia Navari, David Boucher and Gary Browning; the latter's edited series on international political theory (which includes the book under review) and his own contribution to Oakeshott's studies deserve special mention as a major scholarly contribution. Yet another recently published text, by Mervyn Frost and Silviya Lechner (Practice theory and international relations, Cambridge University Press, 2018), has much of value to add about Oakeshott's thought

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