Reviewing A Companion to Michael Oakeshott
My friend Leslie Marsh and veteran Oakeshott scholar Paul Franco have released A Companion to Michael Oakeshott , a collection of essays by various authors (including my PhD adviser David Boucher) with Penn State Press. I'm reviewing it for Collingwood and British Idealism Studies , and so, as usual, I will post about it here as I prepare my review. The first essay I will discuss is the first one in the book, Robert Grant's "The Pursuit of Intimacy," which details Grant's findings on Oakeshott's love life. Now, I have known for some time that Oakeshott had been a womanizer, but what is described in this essay is far more extreme than anything I had imagined. It turns out that during the late 1940s and the 1950s, Oakeshott was almost never sleeping with fewer than three women at once. A typical "courtship" technique for him was basically to stalk women until they gave in: he would, for instance, sit outside of their workplace all day, or stand outs...