  In his first book, Experience and Its Modes (1933, cited as EM), Oakeshott barely mentions politics. But this does not mean that he was not interested in political philosophy when he wrote it. The book grew out of his Cambridge lectures from the late 1920s, “The Philosophical Approach to Politics”, now included in Early Political Writings (Oakeshott 2010). In these lectures he distinguishes different ways of thinking about politics, but in the book these different ways of thinking are detached from the subject of politics and presented as general modes of experience. By the time he wrote Experience and Its Modes, Oakeshott had come to believe that political philosophy was necessarily defective—that it was limited by its commitment to a pre-philosophically demarcated sphere of experience and therefore not genuine philosophy. The book is a highly individual performance in the style of British philosophical Idealism, written at a time when that approach to philosophy was rapidly going out of fashion. In it, Oakeshott credits the influence of Hegel, Bradley, and Bosanquet, but it was evident that he had absorbed their views “into an insistent literary personality which moved freely and suggestively in many types of literature” (Cowling 2003: 256). When Oakeshott took up politics again in the late 1930’s, it was in relation to the controversies of the day. At the urging of the Cambridge political scientist Ernest Barker, and partly motivated by the hope it would gain him a professorship, he compiled an anthology of texts expounding the “doctrines” of contemporary Europe: Representative Democracy, Catholicism, Communism, Fascism, and National Socialism (Oakeshott 1939). His first postwar publication was an edition of Hobbes’s Leviathan, with an influential introduction later published together with other essays on Hobbes in Hobbes on Civil Association (Oakeshott 1975b). In 1947 he founded the Cambridge Journal, a short-lived but critically esteemed vehicle treating politics and culture as topics for civilized conversation rather than ideological polemics or academic research. Several of the essays reprinted in Rationalism in Politics first appeared there.