I first encountered Michael Oakeshott as a sophomore in college when, whether providentially or accidentally, I picked his edition of Hobbes’s Leviathan off the shelf in my college’s library. I had barely begun to study Hobbes, and I knew nothing about Oakeshott. I sat down to read the Introduction and, reading it straight through, found it to be such an exciting intellectual experience that it was a spur to my embryonic commitment to the study of political philosophy. This was 1958. Oakeshott was, apart from this edition of Hobbes, little known in the United States. I continued to pursue political philosophy with this experience in the back of my mind. Then, in 1962, as I was beginning my graduate work, Oakeshott’s Rationalism in Politics appeared. This collection of essays, which he had written for various occasions from the end of World War II to 1960, was the beginning of his wider notice in America. Initially, however, the reception was mixed.