Nardin develops this thesis by pursuing several interesting claims. First is his own variation of the position held by most of Oakeshott's more thorough interpreters, that his political thought must be understood in some way through his philosophical commitments, an attitude exemplified in the title of the first book-length monograph on Oakeshott, W. H. Greenleaf 's Oakeshott's Philosophical Politics (1966). Second is that Oakeshott's philosophy should be understood not simply as a necessary background to his political thought but as an original, if too-little-heralded, contribution to twentieth-century philosophy. Third is that while politics has an important place in Oakeshott's thought, its significance diminished almost to a vanishing point by the end of his writing life.

Nardin gives the second of these claims the most attention, presenting carefully written explications of some of Oakeshott's most difficult works. With a grounding in Oakeshott's early work in idealist philosophy, especially in Experience and Its Modes (1933), and drawing out important similarities and connections from it to the philosophical underpinnings of On Human Conduct (1975) and other writings, Nardin works to provide a coherent picture of Michael Oakeshott, the philosopher of human experience. What makes us human, for Oakeshott, is not simply that we experience the world, but that we experience it only and always as we orient ourselves to it; that we order our experience is human, but examining and reflecting how we do so is what the philosopher undertakes. Whether expressed in the formal concept of modes or variations upon the metaphors of language, voice, conversation, and idiom, Nardin contends, woven throughout Oakeshott's writings is his attention to the character and limitations of these orderings and expressions of experience and their relationships to one another.

Nardin further suggests that this approach allows for Oakeshott to account for several significant twentieth-century philosophical alternatives, such as positivism, hermeneutics, phenomenology, and pragmatism, ascertaining what they can offer to understanding. More importantly, though, Oakeshott's perspective also reveals the limitations of each of these philosophies as they mistakenly take the limited view of one mode or idiom to be universal, as in scientific experience in the case of positivism or practical experience in the case of phenomenology and pragmatism. The advocates of each of these schools will need to judge how deeply the criticisms generated from Oakeshott via Nardin cut. Oakeshott scholars, however, will have to consider how well Nardin's coherent picture of him can be sustained. In places, Nardin describes conspicuous changes in Oakeshott's work, like the abandonment of the Hegelian notion of the absolute and the conception of philosophy that generates from it (p. 23); yet he also feels able to express the philosophy of Michael Oakeshott as if these were not consequential, drawing upon passages from works written decades apart and for different purposes to elicit a single picture of Oakeshott's philosophy. Here, Nardin's detailed textual analysis can work at odds with the broader theme he hopes it will sustain. Given the differences among interpreters of Oakeshott regarding the character and significance of such changes, more explicit engagement of this question would have been helpful.

In keeping with the theme of the book, politics comes last in its considerations, viewed from the prior philosophical interpretation. Nardin introduces an insightful connection between Oakeshott's modal approach and his attention first to individuality and then to how civility protects it. The connecting concept is difference. Humans in general differently order and express their experience in various modes, idioms, and voices, and particular human agents individuate as they differently navigate those modes, idioms, and voices. Civility and its formal expression in the rule of law are seen as the human practices most capable of incorporating this difference expressed in agency. Intriguing as this interpretation is, this section of the book, which takes up the last chapter and much of the conclusion, is the least well developed, and it provides even more stress on the picture of an Oakeshott holding a consistent, coherent philosophy. For example, a theme that Nardin returns to throughout the work is the fundamental distinction for Oakeshott between “Understanding and Doing,” as he entitles his second chapter, or theory and practice. Yet he acknowledges that Oakeshott's political thinking can at moments combine expressions of historical theorizing, philosophical reflection, and practical concerns (p. 220). For a philosopher like Oakeshott, who holds a coherence theory of truth, acknowledgment of inconsistency, contradiction, or significant change may seem to be an especially damning charge; but a complex identity like a philosopher and his ideas will likely express difference and variation, and these can be insightful even when contradictory.

This review would be remiss if it did not make special mention of Nardin's examination of the topics in the two chapters entitled “Understanding in the Human Sciences” and “Historical Understanding,” which are the most original and instructive in The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott. While others have considered Oakeshott's philosophical approach to knowledge generally, none has provided such a sustained discussion of his understanding of how humans come to know and theorize about other human agents. Another favor that Nardin grants us all is to highlight Oakeshott's essay “On History,” found in a brief edited volume with the same title. This collection also includes an essay entitled “The Rule of Law,” which while not enough attended to, as Nardin shows, needs to be recognized as a reprise and further development of the themes in On Human Conduct. Happily, while Nardin has highlighted the significance of the works in this collection, Liberty Press has newly reissued Oakeshott's On History (2000). As a thinker who published his thoughts on so many topics for more than six decades, Oakeshott may have been too much of an individual to have held a philosophy that can be captured in a coherent picture. Yet if Nardin's account cannot quite present that, it provides a challenging view to Oakeshott scholars and a thorough, clear starting place for all those interested in his ideas.