Himmelfarb, Gertrude, "The Conservative Imagination: Michael Oakeshott." The American Scholar 44, no. 3. 1975.

Excerpt:

THE TITLE OF HIS FIRST VOLUME OF ESSAYS, published in 1950, Lionel Trilling perfectly captured the spirit of the time. “The Liberal Imagination” – not “the liberal philosophy,” nor “the liberal creed,” nor even “liberalism” – implied a mode of thought that was more cultural than political (although it did have political consequences), that depended more upon sentiments and attitudes than upon ideas (although it did have intellectual implications), and that was unquestionably the dominant force in American life. So dominant was it that Trilling could find no “conservative imagination” to set beside it, nothing but occasional, erratic, conservative “impulses,” “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.”

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JSTOR/The American Scholar