Michael Oakeshott  Michael Joseph Oakeshott FBA (; 11 December 1901 – 19 December 1990) was an English philosopher and political theorist who wrote about philosophy of history, philosophy of religion, aesthetics, philosophy of education, and philosophy of law. Oakeshott was the son of Frances Maude (Hellicar) and Joseph Francis Oakeshott, a civil servant and a member of the Fabian Society. George Bernard Shaw was a friend. Michael Oakeshott attended St George's School, Harpenden, from 1912 to 1920. He enjoyed his schooldays, and the Headmaster, Cecil Grant, later became a friend. In 1920, Oakeshott became an undergraduate at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he read history. He obtained an MA and subsequently became a Fellow. While he was at Cambridge he admired the British idealist philosophers J. M. E. McTaggart and John Grote, and the medieval historian Zachary Nugent Brooke. The historian Herbert Butterfield was a contemporary and fellow member of the Junior Historians society. Oakeshott was dismayed by the political extremism that occurred in Europe during the 1930s, and his surviving lectures from this period reveal a dislike of National Socialism and Marxism. Although Oakeshott, in his essay "The Claim of Politics" (1939), defended the right of individuals not to become directly involved, he joined the British Army in 1941. He reportedly wished to join the Special Operations Executive (SOE), but the military decided that his appearance was "too unmistakably English" for him to conduct covert operations on the Continent. He was on active service in Europe with the intelligence unit Phantom, which had connections with the Special Air Service (SAS), but he was never in the front line. In 1945 Oakeshott was demobilised and returned to Cambridge. In 1947 he left Cambridge for Nuffield College, Oxford, but after only a year there he secured an appointment as Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics (LSE), succeeding the leftist Harold Laski. Oakeshott was deeply unsympathetic to the student activism at LSE during the late 1960s, on the grounds that it disrupted the work of the university. He retired from the LSE in 1969. In his retirement he retreated to live quietly in a country cottage in Langton Matravers in Dorset with his third wife. He was divorced twice and had numerous affairs, some of them with wives of his students and colleagues, and even with a girlfriend of his son Simon.