Michael Oakeshott’s interest in religion and theology was especially prominent in his essays of the 1920s and 1930s. This book consists of four important unpublished pieces, together with six essays by Oakeshott that originally appeared in remote and inaccessible journals. Much of the collection was written early in his career and reveals not only Oakeshott’s initial intellectual preoccupations but the idiosyncratic nature of his religious outlook and the moral convictions that governed his own life. The opening essay, "Religion and the World," which dates from 1925, reflects his view of what it means to live "religiously" in the world and prefigures arguments later elaborated in Experience and Its Modes.

All the essays probe the meaning of words commonly—but often inappropriately—used in the discussion of political life. Thus Oakeshott explores meanings of religion and worldliness, society and sociality, authority and the state, political activity, and the character of political ideas and political philosophy. His writing is persuasive and compelling, and the essays are distinguished by great clarity and a genuinely philosophic spirit.

In a substantial introduction, Timothy Fuller provides the first full explanation of Oakeshott’s religious ideas, setting them within their philosophical and political contexts. He shows how, over a thirty-year period, Oakeshott elaborated the implications of Experience and Its Modes, worked out his political theory as summarized in Rationalism in Politics, and gradually assembled his own philosophical account of the ideal that European civilization had made concrete in history—civil association under the rule of law—and to which he gave definitive expression in On Human Contact.

邁剋爾•歐剋肖特（Michael Oakeshott ,1901-1990），英國哲學傢、政治思想傢，20世紀最重要的保守主義知識分子。其思想融英國觀念論與休謨的懷疑論於一爐，對伯剋等人所建立的英國傳統保守主義思想從哲學上做瞭係統闡述。他對於知識論、政治哲學、曆史哲學、宗教哲學和教育哲學都有著深湛的研究和闡發，在英美學術界享有極高聲譽，被譽為“20世紀少有的傑齣政治哲學傢”、“這個世紀最有原創性的學院政治哲學傢”、“是密爾或伯剋以來盎格魯-撒剋遜傳統最偉大的政治哲學傢”。