Abstract
Because most of Michael Oakeshott's writings have been of a social and political nature, it has been easy to overlook his major work in philosophy, Experience and Its Modes, even though he is arguably first and foremost a philosopher.1 Most of the journalistic symposiums on Oakeshott appear to have been dominated by political scientists, and the essays contributed to these symposiums seldom cite more than his political and social writings.2 References to Experience tend to be fleeting. It took thirty-one years to sell out the first (1933) printing of one thousand copies of this book,3 and its subsequent distribution, despite its release in paperback in 1985, has been consistently overshadowed by Oakeshott's collection of political essays, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, published in 1962.4
