  Michael Oakeshott’s father, Joseph Oakeshott, was a member of the Fabian Society, a socialist but not radical organization (its symbol was the tortoise), many of whose members participated in establishing the British Labor Party. The Society’s leaders, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, were among the founders of the London School of Economics. The younger Oakeshott studied history at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, in the early 1920s and became a life fellow in 1925. After serving in the British Army between 1940 and 1945, he returned to Cambridge, then taught briefly at Nuffield College, Oxford, before becoming Professor of Political Science at the LSE in 1951. At some point during his years at the LSE he launched an annual course of lectures in the history of political thought. Focused initially on canonical authors and texts, after the fashion of the lectures he delivered at Harvard in 1958 (Oakeshott 1993b), the course gradually became a more comprehensive examination of the political experience and thought of four peoples: the ancient Greeks, the Romans, medieval Christians, and modern Europeans (Oakeshott 2006). He also led a seminar in the history of political thought for postgraduate students and, as an emeritus professor, was active in it until 1980, contributing papers on the historical study of political thought and the philosophy of history. Brief accounts of Oakeshott’s life can be found in two memorial collections (Norman 1993; Marsh 2001) and a biographical essay (Grant 2012). The notebooks Oakeshott kept for much of his life (Oakeshott 2014) offer additional insights, as do his unpublished letters.