Journal of Political Political Ideologies Ideologies
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Oakeshott's concept of ideology David D. Corey To cite this article: David article: David D. Corey (2014) Oakeshott's concept of ideology, Journal of Political Ideologies, 19:3, 261-282, DOI: 10.1080/13569317.2014.951145 10.1080/13569317.2014.951145 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13569317.2014.951145
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Date: 10 Date: 10 November 2016, At: 19:23
Journal of Political Ideologies, Ideologies, 2014 Vol. 19, No. 3, 261–282, 261–282, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13569317.2014.951145
Oakeshott’s concept of ideology DAVID D. COREY Department of Political Science, Baylor University, Waco, TX, 76798-7276, USA
ABSTRACT Mi Mich chae aell Oa Oake kesh shott ott’s ’s cr criti itiqu quee of ‘p ‘pol oliti itica call ra ratio tiona nali lism sm’’ is oft often en regarded as a unique contribution to the study of 20th-century ‘ideologies.’ But, in fact, Oakeshott understood rationalism and ideology as distinct phenomena. This article exposes the essence of each in Oakeshott’s writings, analyses their complex relationship and shows how far back in human history they reached. Neither was, for Oakeshott, distinctly modern. In fact, he traced t raced ideology and rationalism alike to th the e bi birt rth h of ph philo iloso soph phyy in an anci cien entt Gr Gree eece ce,, ev even en wh while ile he ac ackn know owle ledg dged ed important differences in their ancient and modern manifestations. Oakeshott’s outlook with respect to these phenomena was significantly more pessimistic than that of other 20th-century analysts. He did not think our problems were easily curable. He did, however, harbour some hope (albeit dreamy) that in the domain of politics in particular, the metaphor of ‘conversation’ might somehow loosen the grip of ideological thought and action.
Though the word ideology has many meanings, some of them mutuall mutually y exclusive, it continues to be an indispensable analytical concept in contemporary political theory. Far from disappearing from the scene as was once expected, ideologies of all sorts appear to be thriving today—some grand, some modest; some negative, some positive; some new, some old.1 The endeavour to understand ideologies (including the various ways the word itself can be use used) is therefore an important aspect of our effort to understand politics in general.2 Michael Oakeshott’s use of thee te th term rm,, wh whic ich h fo form rmss th thee su subj bjec ectt of th thee pr pres esen entt st stud udy, y, pr prov oves es es espe peci cial ally ly illuminating in this regard. Oakeshott’s concept of ideology was more original than has been hitherto recognized because commentators have tended to conflate hiss cr hi crit itiq ique ue of it wi with th hi hiss br broa oade derr an and d mo more re fa fami mili liar ar cr crit itiq ique ue of ‘m ‘mod oder ern n 3 rationalism.’ But ide ideolo ology gy and rat rationa ionalis lism m wer weree for him dis distin tinct. ct. Oak Oakesh eshott ott understood modern rationalism in the standard way as an intellectual temperament that emerged from the exuberances of the Renaissance and the upheavals of the Reforma Ref ormation tion.. Tho Though ugh his con concep ceptt of rat rationa ionalis lism m was not uni unique, que, his spi spirite rited d 4 critique of it certainly was, at least in its breadth and sophistication. However, Oakeshott in fact never described rationalism as an ideology, despite his view that ideology and rationalism were closely linked. q
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Thus, we need to wrestle with the following questions: what exactly did Oakeshott mean by ‘ideology’? What is the precise relationship between ideology and rationalism? And finally, what is the philosophical significance of Oakeshott’s work in this area? As I argue later, Oakeshott’s concept of ideology was critical, but not as critical as his view of rationalism, and yet, insofar as ideologies were problematic for Oakeshott, they were vexingly so because they seemed to him to spring not from some ephemeral defect of modernity but rather from certain propensities of human experience itself. This helps to explain why ideologies (as Oakeshott used the term) constitute a permanent feature of political life. Rationalism
Rationalism is, methodologically speaking, an ideal type designed to identify a certain cast of mind.5 Like all ideal types, it consists of a collection of diverse elements grouped together to form a coherent whole. These elements can be matter-of-factly enumerated. However, to do so would be to miss something of the power of Oakeshott’s presentation, which combines the appearance of valueneutrality with an invitation for readers to see beyond this conceit and to quietly chuckle at the manifest excesses of the rationalist temperament. The Rationalist, as Oakeshott styles him, is overly confident in his unassisted powers of reason to solve every human problem. He sees life as little more than a series of problems to be rationally overcome. He does not see the tangle and variety of human experience, but is apt to oversimplify, to offer barebones rules, formulae and theories that pretend to completeness. The Rationalist is also, necessarily, an enemy of custom, because its fruits seem so messy and unintended. He dislikes all authority save the authority of reason. And he attributes the manifold errors of the benighted past to the lack (prior to his own time) of a suitably rational method for attaining knowledge. More than hinting at the Rationalist’s intellectual pride, Oakeshott writes that ‘if he were more self-critical he might begin to wonder how the race had ever succeeded in surviving [without him].’6 The relative absence of self-criticism in the Rationalist temperament is quite significant in terms of Oakeshott’s own intellectual development. By studying Oakeshott’s early writings with some care, Luke O’Sullivan has shown that Oakeshott was to some extent a committed rationalist himself in his youth. Especially in the 1920s, Oakeshott subscribed to a form of rationalism connected with British Idealism, one that placed great emphasis on formal definition as the proper culmination of philosophical reflection. Oakeshott was at pains during this period to work out definitions of ‘politics,’ ‘the state’ and ‘the self’ in order to seek their unity in some notion of a ‘rational general will.’7 Perhaps more importantly, Oakeshott shared the widespread hope of many Idealist Rationalists of the 1920s that ‘radical improvement in European politics was imminent.’8 Only when this hope was so manifestly dashed in the events leading up to World War II did Oakeshott turn away from his Rationalist persuasion. Thus, he for his part was capable of self-criticism, while those who clung to Idealism after the war were not. O’Sullivan observes that Oakeshott ‘moved towards an increasingly sceptical and 262
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minimalistic approach to political philosophy largely by way of self9 criticism.’ Robert Grant has suggested something similar in his fine treatment of Oakeshott’s Idealist outlook, and this goes some way towards explaining Oakeshott’s apparently intimate knowledge of the rationalist temperament.10 Because of the Rationalist’s unbounded confidence in his ability to formulate saving truths, Oakeshott described his cast of mind as gnostic. 11 This is one of several places where Oakeshott’s presentation of rationalism overlaps with Eric Voegelin’s famous reflections on ideology, in this case Voegelin’s theory developed in the 1950s and 1960s that modern ideologies are at root variants of ‘gnosticism.’12 But one should not press this similarity too far. Oakeshott’s emphasis is consistently less on the spiritual aspects of the phenomena he has in mind than on other aspects. Why? The answer is certainly not—as one might at first conjecture—that Oakeshott failed to recognize the spiritual decadence of the modern condition. His own words suffice to refute this. He lists among the deep motivations of rationalism a ‘decline in the belief in Providence’ and the desire to substitute an ‘infallible technique’ for a ‘beneficient [sic ] and infallible God.’13 So whatever Oakeshott’s own spiritual inclinations may have been, he was certainly aware of the close link between rationalism and religious scepticism in the West. He knew these phenomena were connected from the beginning and remained so in his own time. But Oakeshott had a different, much more compelling reason, to prescind from offering too much spiritual commentary in his work on the gnostic Rationalist (relative to someone like Voegelin). It is that Oakeshott declined to view the human experience as reducible to a single ‘mode,’ even one as elevated as religious or spiritual experience. Such pluralism was a fundamental feature of Oakeshott’s thought, even from his earliest writings. To some extent it can be traced back to his reading of Bernard Bosanquet’s History of Aesthetics, in which art is approached in pluralist terms.14 But for Oakeshott, art, poetry and music; geometry, physics and astronomy; ethics and religion; and finally philosophy are essentially different groups of activities, radically disparate ways of engaging the world. They simply could not be collapsed as if they were variants of one fundamental engagement.15 And precisely because human experience occurs in a plurality of modes, so too must social scientific explanation be multimodal in scope when it attends to phenomena of any complexity. To describe something as pervasive, not to say invasive, as modern rationalism in strictly spiritual terms would involve a kind of fallacy that Oakeshott, perhaps more than anyone of his generation, was keen to avoid. What Oakeshott emphasized instead of (or in addition to) spiritual themes in his analysis of rationalism was its philosophical presuppositions and character in politics. Philosophically, rationalism reposes on a theory of knowledge which Oakeshott described as the prioritizing of ‘technical’ over ‘practical’ knowledge, or rather ‘the assertion that practical knowledge is not knowledge at all that, properly speaking, there is no knowledge which is not technical knowledge.’16 Technical knowledge for Oakeshott is ‘what can be learned in a book and applied mechanically,’ while practical knowledge is everything else . . .
. . .
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about knowing—what cannot be reduced to verbal formulae. Practical knowledge, as Oakeshott described it, ‘only exists in practice, and the only way to acquire it is by apprenticeship to a master who is perpetually practicing it.’ He continues: . . .
In the arts and in natural science what normally happens is that the pupil, in being taught and in learning the technique from his master, discovers himself to have acquired also another sort of knowledge than merely technical knowledge, without it ever having been precisely imparted and often without being able to say precisely what it is. Thus a pianist acquires artistry as well as technique, a chess-player style and insight into the game as well as a knowledge of the moves, and a scientist acquires (among other things) the sort of judgment which tells him when his technique is leading him astray and the connoisseurship which enables him to distinguish the profitable from the unprofitable directions to explore. 17
The philosophical foundation of rationalism thus comes to light as the elevation of that part of knowledge which can be transmitted epideictically over that part which cannot. And the Rationalist approaches knowledge in this way because he is (to a fault) obsessed with certainty. Technique seems more certain than ‘practice’ because it appears perfectly self-contained, as if it begins and ends in the certainty of rules. A particularly striking example of the Rationalist’s approach to politics is supplied by Ludwig von Mises’ short treatise on liberalism from the late nineteentwenties. ‘Die Probleme der Politik sind Probleme der gesellschaftlichen Technik,’ writes von Mises, ‘und ihre Lo¨sung muß auf demselben Wege und mit denselben Mitteln versucht werden, die uns bei der Lo¨sung anderer technischer ¨ berlegung und durch ¨ nftige U Aufgaben zur Verfu¨gung stehen: durch vernu Erforschung der gegebenen Bedingungen.’ According to this view, ‘Alles, was der Mensch ist und was ihn u¨ber das Tier hinaushebt, dankt er der Vernunft. Warum sollte er gerade in der Politik auf den Gebrauch der Vernunft verzichten und sich dunkeln und unklaren Gefu¨hlen und Impulsen anvertrauen’?18 The question is wrongly posed, Oakeshott would likely have said. The main error of the Rationalist is not his over-reliance on reason (though that is an error), but rather his obtuse contraction of reason to mere technical knowing.19 Genealogically, Oakeshott traced the philosophical foundations of rationalism back to Bacon and Descartes, even though he did not regard either of these thinkers as full-blown Rationalists. Rather, he thought that modern rationalism sprang from ‘the exaggeration of Bacon’s hopes and the neglect of the scepticism of Descartes.’ Rationalism was ‘what commonplace minds made out of the inspiration of men of discrimination and genius.’20 What does this mean? Bacon hoped to discover a new method of attaining certain knowledge, utterly superior to any method from the past (scholasticism was especially to be rejected). According to Bacon, the mind of the inquirer needed first to be purged of all opinion. Then what was needed was a clear set of rules for attaining knowledge that could be memorized and mechanically applied, and Bacon hoped such rules might apply universally to all branches of knowledge. However, Bacon knew that he had not succeeded personally in achieving this dream. Descartes for his part adopted Bacon’s project more or less wholesale, but also came to appreciate its radical 264
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limits. Descartes became quite sceptical, according to Oakeshott, that anything like geometrical certainty could be attained in the natural and especially the human sciences. Thus, ‘the sovereignty of technique,’ imagined by Bacon and attempted likewise by Descartes, turned out ‘to be a dream not a reality.’21 But again, if one were to retain Bacon’s hopes and neglect Descartes’ scepticism, one would arrive at what Oakeshott understood to be the origin (or rather one aspect of the origin) of modern rationalism. This final qualification is worth stressing because it corroborates what I have already said about the relationship between Oakeshott and Voegelin. In setting out the historical origins of rationalism, Oakeshott was clear that in fact ‘there are no origins,’ only the ‘slowly mediated changes, the flow and ebb of the tides of inspiration which issue finally in a shape identifiably new.’22 Here is a caution against seeking too precise a beginning for phenomena in our intellectual world. And it goes hand in hand with a caution against artificially narrowing the domains or ‘modes’ in which human phenomena are experienced. In this vein, Oakeshott stressed that by focusing on the problem of knowledge, he was in fact ‘considering only one element [inter alia ] in the context of [rationalism’s] emergence,’23 and that the future development of rationalism would similarly involve ‘every department of intellectual activity.’24 With Oakeshott we thus find an expansive, pluralist view of human experience that calls for a multimodal approach to philosophical and historical explanation. It is as if Oakeshott recognized the kind of spiritual genealogy that Voegelin would have offered for modern rationalism (or gnosticism, in Voegelin’s case) but did not think that it exhausted the phenomena in need of explanation.25 The other aspect of rationalism that Oakeshott wanted to stress (besides its philosophical origins) was its political character; and here we come into direct contact with the matter of ideology. When rationalism manifests itself in politics it entails a constant effort to replace traditional things (institutions, policies, practices and habitual ways of thinking) with newly thought-out, more ‘rational’ versions. When the thing under attack is something like a policy, we get a ‘reform,’ for example healthcare reform or energy reform. But when the thing under attack is a tradition of ideas (for example the just war tradition or the common law tradition or the conservative tradition) we get something categorically different from the thing being replaced—we get an ‘ideology.’26 I shall say more shortly about what the word ‘ideology’ means in this context, but for now let me gloss it as Oakeshott himself does, as a ‘formalized abridgment of the supposed substratum of rational truth contained in the tradition.’27 Ideology is the result of ‘idea reform,’ just as a new policy is the result of policy reform. But the reform of a tradition of ideas is different because the result is inevitably a mere simulacrum or hollow shell of the thing it is meant to replace. Of course the Rationalist does not realize this. He supposes that a ‘Declaration of Independence’ is unequivocally better than the traditions of English liberty from which it emerged. Or, to take an example from the present day, the Rationalist supposes that a just war ‘theory’ stated succinctly in rational propositions is unequivocally better than a just war tradition encompassing centuries of experience and . . .
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reflection. He is, as Oakeshott thought, not utterly wrong in this view. Again ideological abridgements have some advantages over a whole tradition—clarity, for instance. But significant losses are entailed as well. And in practical terms, the losses may prove quite consequential. But before I explain why, let me take one step back in order to round out Oakeshott’s account of rationalism in politics. I have said that Rationalists desire traditions of all sorts to be supplanted by selfconsciously reasoned-out reforms. But this is only one example of a general tendency that Oakeshott saw at the heart of rationalism in politics. The heart of the matter is that political activity itself is understood fundamentally as ‘problem solving,’ as if there were no other manner in which to approach the art of governing. The reformation of institutions and ideas is one venue for problem solving. The other, Oakeshott thought, was supplied by circumstance: sudden inflation, unemployment, corporate corruption, budget stand-offs, terrorist attacks and even hurricanes. Whatever problems the exigencies of collective life happen to produce at a particular place and time will inevitably occupy half, if not more than half, of the Rationalist’s political attention. These problems too must be rationally solved, and government must engineer their solution. Because such problems are (notoriously) unpredictable—irrational in their sudden appearance on the scene—Oakeshott could protest that the Rationalist problem-solver ‘waits upon circumstance to provide him with his problems, but rejects its [circumstance’s] aid in their solution.’28 And Oakeshott thus referred to this style of politics as that of the ‘felt need.’ It is a crisis style of politics which may prove more or less opportune for leaders depending on what else they wish to accomplish, but it is a style that can never be avoided as long as politics is understood primarily as problem solving. A final aspect of rationalism in politics that is worth noting for its salience today is what Oakeshott called the ‘politics of uniformity,’ the belief that if a rational solution for a political problem has been reached, to allow ‘any relevant part of society to escape from the solution is, ex hypothesi, to countenance irrationality.’29 The view under attack here is, fascinatingly, one that Oakeshott may have once held himself. Certainly in 1925, when he wrote a manuscript entitled ‘A Discussion of Some Matters Preliminary to the Study of Political Philosophy,’ he was willing to cite with approval Spinoza’s dictum in the Ethics, that ‘all reasonable men agree.’30 By the late 1940s, Oakeshott embraced a much more sceptical view of uniformity of any kind. By then he would have likely agreed with George Santayana’s complaint about life in liberal society: ‘if you refuse to move in the prescribed direction, you are not simply different, you are arrested and perverse.’31 Ideology
The temptation to view rationalism as an ideology of some kind or perhaps as another word for ideology itself is understandable. Like the most notorious ideologies of the 20th century, rationalism (especially in politics) springs from inadequately examined premises and tends to invade every area of life—it is thus 266
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‘totalistic.’ But the problem with treating Oakeshottian rationalism as an ideology is that Oakeshott himself did not do so, and I do not think one is entitled to play fast and loose with terms Oakeshott took pains to employ with precision. We therefore need to ask what he meant by ideology. Oakeshott used this term in an unconventional way—not to refer to an individual’s ‘personal worldview,’ as the term is often used today; nor to ref er to a ‘science of ideas,’ as it was used by its originator, Destutt de Tracy in 179632; nor to refer to the oppressive dogmas of the capitalist ‘superstructure,’ as Marx and Engels used the term33; nor to refer to pseudo-scientific intellectual systems (e.g. Marxism) as writers like Eric Voegelin used the term.34 What, then, did Oakeshott mean by it? He used the term ideology to refer to generalizations about human conduct teased out of concrete experience and artificially purified so that they can be stated propositionally in the form of a creed or manifesto or any other statement of principles. Ideologies are ‘abstractions’ in the quite literal sense of being abstracted from the particulars of place, time and circumstance. They are the general principles that seem implicit in particular experiences; they are what remain after one has ‘separated the ore of the ideal from the dross of the habit of behaviour.’35 As such, ideologies are not necessarily a bad thing. Oakeshott even acknowledged that ideologies may be useful at certain moments in political lif e because they give ‘sharpness of outline and precision to a political tradition.’36 Every society which is intellectually alive is liable, from time to time, to abridge its tradition of behaviour into a scheme of abstract ideas; and on occasion political discussion will be concerned, not (like the debates in the Iliad ) with isolated transactions, nor (like the speeches in Thucydides) with policies and traditions of activity, but with general principles. And in this there is no harm; perhaps even some positive benefit. It is possible that the distorting mirror of an ideology will reveal important hidden passages in the tradition, as a caricature reveals the potentialities of a face; and if this is so, the intellectual enterprise of seeing what a tradition looks like when it is reduced to an ideology will be a useful part of political education.37
However, Oakeshott astutely avoided saying too much about the ways in which ideologies may be useful because (he evidently thought) their dangers far outweighed their benefits. Ideologies are problematic not in themselves but in how they are understood and used. And here one can distinguish two separate criticisms Oakeshott made. The first is the less devastating. It is that ideologies qua ‘doctrines’ are so arid compared to the experiences they purport to represent that if one were to understand an ideology as superior to, or even roughly equivalent to, the thing itself (as inevitably happens) then one suffers a significant loss. This is what I meant earlier when I said the Rationalist, insofar as he admires ideologies, is apt to view the Declaration of Independence as unequivocally better than the tradition of English liberty. It is not unequivocally better. Traditions are rich and fluid, ideologies thin and fixed (at least as Oakeshott understands them). And we have already seen why: ideologies only capture that part of human knowledge in any 267
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given domain that can be formulated into precepts—which is to say the ‘technical’ but not the ‘practical’ part. ‘St. Francois de Sales was a devout man,’ Oakeshott wrote, ‘but when he writes [the Introduction to the Devout Life ] it is about the technique of piety.’38 Yet technical knowledge is not the bulk of knowledge, nor is it sufficient as a guide. Successful human action often depends on habit, knack, prudence, inspired genius, intuitive leaps, creativity, sympathetic awareness, taste, and discrimination. Yet none of these capacities is captured in the ‘technical’ aspect of knowledge expressed in formulae and rules. Oakeshott thus thought that the substitution of doctrine for genuine experience tended to undermine whatever it touched by turning it into an abstraction. And he claimed that religion had suffered more than any other domain in this respect. 39 But Oakeshott also worried that whatever toll the ideological impulse had taken in religion, it was poised to take an even more devastating toll across the board of human experience. The problem in general in Oakeshott’s view is that ideologies are culturally destructive. First they destroy (in the name of rational improvement) the traditions upon which they depend, then they necessarily shrivel up and die themselves because they cannot survive without that which they transformed. Oakeshott’s most forceful expression of this problem occurs in the final paragraph of ‘Rationalism in Politics,’ as he turned to describe the ‘morality’ of the Rationalist:
Moral ideals are a sediment; they have significance only so long as they are suspended in a religious or social tradition, so long as they belong to a religious or social life. The predicament of our time is that the Rationalists have been at work so long on their project of drawing off the liquid in which our moral ideals were suspended (and pouring it away as worthless) that we are left only with the dry and gritty residue which chokes us as we try to take it down. 40
Oakeshott supplied several concrete examples beside the American Declaration of Independence of what he took to be ideologies. He mentions, for instance, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, insofar as that document is understood as a guide for the founding of societies.41 And if his view of ideology were taken up today, it would arguably implicate some of our most cherished doctrines and manifestos: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the doctrine of free trade, the right to healthcare, the United Nations Millennium Goals and the case for the living wage. Insofar as these are instances of doctrinal abridgement intended to guide political action, abridgements whose creators hope to win for their causes a degree of urgent priority and universal applicability, Oakeshott would likely have viewed them as ideological.42 And his warning would be that these abridgements actually depend for their vitality on the religious and social traditions from which they emerged and which they themselves purport to improve. The second, more devastating problem with ideologies from Oakeshott’s perspective involves people’s expectation that they might serve as quasi-divine guides for political practice. Again, Oakeshott’s critique focuses not so much on ideologies themselves as on how they are understood. Because ideologies are abridgements of the lived experience of a political community, mere 268
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abbreviations, they cannot possibly fulfil the prophetic role of ‘certifying’ our political plans. Understandably we yearn for some kind of objective guide in politics. Political deliberation is contentious and confusing, and a great deal often turns on decisions that are made. Moreover, we are aware deep down (whether we admit it or not) of the manifest uncertainty of so many political premises and conclusions. Who can tell what the future will make of our actions? Who truly knows what ought to be done?43 We thus look for a guide in the way in which Dante the pilgrim looks to Virgil for help. But Oakeshott is adamant that ideology cannot play this role because, in short, an a posteriori account cannot play an a priori function. ‘Political ideology purports to be an abstract principle, or set of related abstract principles, which has been independently premeditated,’ writes Oakeshott. ‘It supplies in advance of the activity [of politics] a formulated end to be pursued, and in so doing it provides a means of distinguishing between those desires which ought to be encouraged and those which ought to be suppressed or redirected.’44 However, as Oakeshott continues: So far from a political ideology being the quasi-divine parent of political activity, it turns out to be its earthly stepchild. Instead of an independently premeditated scheme of ends to be pursued, it is a system of ideas abstracted from the manner in which people have been accustomed to go about the business of attending to the arrangements of their societies. The pedigree of every political ideology shows itself to be the creature, not of premeditation in advance of political activity, but of meditation upon a ma nner of politics. In short, political activity comes first and a political ideology follows after. 45
Because ideology takes flight like the owl of Minerva, only after and in response to events on the ground, it can no more lead those events than the earth’s tides can lead the phases of the moon. Desperate as we are for some ‘playbook’ by which to negotiate the contingencies of political life, ideologies (as Oakeshott conceives them) cannot fill this need.46 To intelligent readers, this may seem one of Oakeshott’s most doubtful claims. What is to prevent a political thinker from using ‘fragments of experience’ and reconstructing them in a different ‘exhortatory pattern’?47 Or, why might ideologies not function somewhat like the way hypotheses function in science? Hypotheses are abstract statements about causal forces at work in the world. Equipped with a hypothesis, a scientist often proceeds as if it were true and observes the results. Hypotheses are in this sense a posteriori formulations that nevertheless play a guiding role in the process of scientific discovery. Of course, a hypothesis is by definition hypothetical, that is subject to revision in light of further experience, and this differs from the qualities Oakeshott ascribes to ideology, which include its being ‘fixed,’ not fluid. But what if anything prevents political ideologies from functioning in this way? This is a question that Robert Grant raised in his elegant study of Oakeshott. And he concluded that Oakeshott probably had some room for a ‘hypothetical-corrective’ model of ideals in politics and morality, even though his most extreme statements seem to rule this out. Oakeshott seemed in fact to have increasingly moved in this direction later in his life, and away from the strict view that ideals can never guide.48 Significantly, his 269
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attachment to the strict view began very early in his youth. Grant dates it back to his having read The Diversions of Purley by Horne Tooke at the age of sixteen.49 Ideology’s relationship to rationalism
Having thus surveyed Oakeshott’s use of the terms rationalism and ideology, it remains to articulate their relationship. As the prior analysis shows, rationalism and ideology are affiliated but distinct, and rationalism is plainly the broader term. This is clear from the essay ‘Rationalism in Politics,’ where Oakeshott introduces his concept of ideology only in order to ‘illustrate’ or supply an ‘example’ of some of rationalism’s tendencies.50 He does not invite readers to conflate rationalism and ideology. Moreover, Oakeshott was consistent enough in his usage to allow readers to pinpoint rationalism’s relationship to ideology precisely: ideology stands to rationalism as an instrument or tool stands to a workman. It is, in effect, a weapon in the Rationalist’s arsenal, one of the means by which he makes war on traditional ways of life. It may indeed be such an essential weapon that one never finds the Rationalist without it, but it is still a tool. Further evidence of this relationship appears in the fact that while Oakeshott routinely presented the ‘disposition’ or ‘character’ of rationalism in the form of a person (The Rationalist), he did not tend to do this with ideology: the term ‘ideologue’ rarely appears in his work. But this is just to scratch the surface of the fascinating and at times deeply ironic way Oakeshott cast the relationship between ideology and rationalism. Ultimately, his handling of both concepts seems designed to have had a calculated effect on any Rationalist reader who might take up his work. Take ‘ideology’—this is not a foreign word, but hails from the Rationalist’s own lexicon. To the typical Rationalist, ideology means a system of dubious dogmas, often propounded to benefit its creators at the expense of those who buy into them. One of the chief goals of the Rationalist is to expose ideological beliefs, and anyone stupid enough to retain an ideology after it has been debunked is said to suffer from ‘false consciousness.’51 But this is not how Oakeshott used the term. Rather he cunningly attached the bad word ‘ideology’ to something the Rationalist himself believes to be unequivocally good—namely the cold and colourless abstractions which the Rationalist calls ‘science.’ Thus, does Oakeshott insinuate himself into the Rationalist’s mind and wreak havoc with his categories. It is the Rationalist, Oakeshott suggests, who in a way suffers from false consciousness by failing to see the way his own abstractions distort reality.52 Something similarly ironic occurs with Oakeshott’s handling of ‘rationalism.’ What is ‘rational’ is typically thought to be good, but rationalism is not good because it is overblown. Thus, what at first looks positively heroic—the reformer hacking his way through prejudice and tradition, armed with nothing but his own reason—suddenly looks clownish when pushed too far. But there is more. How does Oakeshott make the would-be hero appear clownish? He does so by presenting a caricature. He selects certain essential features of his personality, exaggerates these slightly for the purposes of clarity and hands the image back to 270
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the Rationalist in the form of a critique. But of course to describe Oakeshott’s method in this way is to reveal immediately what he has done. He has presented rationalism to the Rationalist in the form of an ideology (as Oakeshott used the term: a set of principles abstracted from experience),53 and this ideological presentation is meant to be instructive—not by serving as a guide, but by revealing the negative potentialities of the thing it caricatures. Oakeshott was clear in a number of his writings that ideological abstractions could be useful—‘as a caricature reveals the potentialities of a face’—and here he illustrates its critical possibilities.54 A final irony in Oakeshott’s presentation of rationalism lies in what he effectively obscures by casting it the way he does. Oakeshott refers to rationalism as a ‘disposition’ and an ‘intellectual fashion.’ But an intellectual fashion that does not quickly fade—one that, on the contrary, has been passed down from one generation to the next for more than four centuries—has another name: it is a 55 tradition, and this has important implications. Of course, rationalism is an awkward tradition, since it is defined in part by its own antipathy towards tradition. But it is a tradition nonetheless, and precisely because of this, there is more to rationalism than Oakeshott’s ‘abridgement’ of it suggests. Qua tradition, it consists not only of technical knowledge but also of ‘practical knowledge’ communicated through apprenticeship. And this is in fact how rationalism is handed down. Rationalist philosophers are inspired by their rationalist teachers, and rationalist politicians apprentice under rationalist mentors.56 Despite the Rationalist’s overwhelming prejudice that what is valuable in a tradition can be reduced to formulae and written down in a book, rationalism itself (like all traditions) does not operate this way as it passes from one generation to the next. It receives its sustenance rather from what is not written down: the practice of rationalism. But this means that rationalism is more dangerous than Oakeshott’s caricature initially suggests. Because rationalism is a rich and vibrant tradition (and not an impotent ‘crib’) it is likely to be around for a long time. And Oakeshott knew this was true. That is why I describe his procedure as ironic: after he reduces rationalism to an abridgement, it seems that something so intellectually impoverished could not possibly survive for long, but he knows, on the contrary, that ‘the Rationalist disposition of mind is not a fashion that sprang up only yesterday,’ and that we should not ‘expect a speedy release from our predicament.’57 Breadth of Oakeshott’s critique
Oakeshott first published ‘Rationalism in Politics’ in 1947, just two years after the German surrender, and the essay offers some important insights into the mass movements that had traumatized Europe through the war. Like all instances of rationalism in politics, Nazism, Fascism and Communism can be interpreted as springing from the desire for perfection coupled with the ‘politics of uniformity.’ They can each be understood as attempting to create an abstract syllabus of ideals, one which would inevitably clash with practical life. And their errors can be 271
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understood in terms of reductivism—the ‘error of mistaking a part for the whole, of endowing a part with the qualities of the whole.’58 But ‘Rationalism in Politics’ is perhaps more noteworthy for what it does not say about Nazism, Fascism, etc., than for what it occasionally suggests. Oakeshott in fact never mentions these movements by name. And his actual target seems to have been at once more local and, in another sense, more historically sweeping. With respect to his ‘local’ target, Oakeshott was certainly aiming at the post-1945 Labour government in Britain, whose policies he mocks in the final paragraph of ‘Rationalism in Politics.’59 A number of other prominent writers including F.A. Hayek and Karl Popper saw the increased ‘planning’ of these years as ‘rationalist’ and worthy of denunciation. Oakeshott’s private correspondence reveals that he agreed with their critique.60 But while Oakeshott was motivated by the increased vogue for planning during the post-war years in Britain, his target was not limited to the Labour government. Rather, he made clear from the start of ‘Rationalism in Politics’ that the disease of rationalism could not be confined to one side of the contemporary ideological spectrum. Already ‘[it] had come to colour the ideas, not merely of one, but of all political persuasions, and to flow over every party line.’61 Thus, he claimed that ‘almost all politics today have become Rationalist or near-Rationalist,’ and backed this up with a now-famous swipe at F.A. Hayek: A plan to resist all planning may be better than its opposite, but it belongs to the same style of politics. And only in a society already deeply infected with rationalism will the conversion of the traditional resources of resistance to the tyranny of r ationalism into a self-conscious ideology be considered a strengthening of those resources. 62
As many commentators have since remarked, the attack on Hayek was not quite fair, since Hayek himself criticized rationalism in ways quite similar to Oakeshott’s critique.63 Oakeshott’s point though was that in his attempt to popularize a defence of classical liberalism, Hayek had in effect presented it ideologically—the way a rationalist would. Thus, for Oakeshott, the political Right was not exempt from the charge of rationalism or ideology. Not only was Oakeshott’s critique more far-reaching than a critique of the Left, it was also more than a critique of modern-day Britain. The American Founding, Oakeshott thought, was steeped in rationalism insofar as it celebrated the creation of a new political society guided by abstract principles such as those set out in the Declaration of Independence and a written constitution. Of course, one can quibble with Oakeshott on this point. He was, for instance, inclined to interpret the American Revolution as beginning with ‘an admitted illegality’ and the ‘express rejection of a tradition,’64 while others might justifiably interpret it in terms of the ‘Bill of Particulars’ of the Declaration of Independence, which enumerates crimes according to English custom committed by George III.65 But, be that as it may, Oakeshott could certainly point to a prominent rationalist strand in the American Founding. He cites John Jay: 272
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The Americans are the first people whom Heaven has favoured with an opportunity of deliberating upon, and choosing the forms of government under which they should live. All other constitutions have derived their existence from violence or accidental circumstances, and are therefore probably more distant from their perfection. 66
No doubt, different Founders could be cited to counter this rationalist temperament. Hayek in The Constitution of Liberty pointed to a speech by John Dickinson in order to challenge Oakeshott’s thesis.67 But what Oakeshott could maintain, nevertheless, was that rationalism was, to some extent, coeval with America’s birth as a nation. But the problem goes deeper. Why were some American Founders so inclined towards rationalism? Part of the answer, Oakeshott thought, had to do with their inheritance from Europe: ‘The intellectual gifts of Europe to America had, 68 from the beginning, been predominantly Rationalistic.’ And Oakeshott explained why. The problem was the sudden influx of newcomers to politics (new families as well as whole social classes) that accompanied the tumultuous birth and consolidation of the nation-state. ‘New princes’ could be made overnight, and ever-widening swathes of society could be negotiated with for support. Such newcomers lacked political experience and traditional political education, and they looked, quite naturally, for a ‘crib’ of some kind to make up for their shortcomings. Oakeshott’s view was that no such crib could possibly do the job. There is no ‘magic technique of politics’ that can remove the handicap of a lack of political education.69 But the demand was intense, and some writers began, eventually, to meet it. Machiavelli, according to Oakeshott, is the classic case of a writer who knew that politics could not be reduced to a technical manual but who nevertheless offered a crib to the new prince of his day. That is because Machiavelli also offered something more—something that would supplement his book—namely himself .70 But by the time of John Locke—and in the case of John Locke in particular, Oakeshott thought—something crucial had changed. Political writers had begun to believe in their own cribs, to think they had successfully distilled the complete truth of their political traditions into the form of an abstract treatise. Locke’s Second Treatise was thus ‘an ideology’ according to Oakeshott, especially in the way some Americans used it, viz., as a set of abstract principles designed to guide political action.71 And thus the Americans inherited both the texts and the disposition of the Rationalist from their native England, Oakeshott thought. But where did England herself contract the disease? Oakeshott’s answer is more radical than many may realize. Let me illustrate the broad sweep of his critique of ideology and rationalism by reference to a number of essays he penned in the late 1940s and 1950s. Of course, he famously pointed to the work of Bacon and Descartes as contributing to the problem. But readers are apt to overlook Oakeshott’s careful qualification that the philosophical domain to which he referred was ‘only one element in the context of its [rationalism’s] emergence.’72 Thus, probing more deeply we come to Oakeshott’s claim in an essay entitled . . .
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‘The Voice of Conversation in the Education of Mankind,’ from the same time period, that the problem stemmed from the Reformation. It all began, so far as we are concerned, when our civilization was seized with an unholy rage to reform. And when religion was to be recast from the bottom up according to new dogmatic principles, it was not to be expected that the rest of the arrangements of society should be exempt from the visitation of this plague. Dogmatic politics appears, and Europe, unprepared for this onslaught, was over-run by the barbaric armies of abstract intelligence. 73
This, in effect, pushes the origins of European rationalism back a century earlier than the account given in the essay ‘Rationalism in Politics’ itself. Not only in the 17th century but also in the 16th century, and not only in philosophy but also in religion, can rationalism be found. But in fact Oakeshott traced the origins of European rationalism back much further than the Reformation, as is clear from another essay he wrote during the same period (c.1948) called ‘The Tower of Babel.’ There Oakeshott proclaimed ‘the fact’ that what Europe inherited from both classical and Christian culture, at least as far as morality goes, was ‘not the gift of a morality of habitual behaviour, but of a moral ideology.’74 Europe was, in other words, Rationalist in moral orientation from the start , insofar as it had inherited ancient Greek, Roman and Christian ideals. And Oakeshott was quite specific about what he had in mind. With respect to Christianity, ‘the urge to speculate, to abstract and to define,’ overtook Christianity as a religion and as a way of moral life by the middle of the third century.75 Christianity, which was once habitual, unselfconscious and authentic had by then assimilated itself to the intellectualized forms of morality inherited from the classical world. And as far as antiquity is concerned, the problem, Oakeshott thought, stretched back at least to Plato who, on Oakeshott’s interpretation, viewed knowledge of the idea of ‘justice’ as genuine knowledge released from the uncertainties and relativities of doxa; and as the necessary and sufficient condition of political discourse, which thus could become demonstrative argument governed by an ‘ideology’ composed of a single idea given the status of an axiom. 76
Oakeshott thus explicitly deemed the philosophical project of Plato’s Republic ‘Rationalist’ and ‘ideological.’77 But he also (elsewhere) implicated the historical Socrates, and thus the very roots of philosophy in the West, in a way that I do not believe has been adequately noted. In his essay entitled ‘Conduct and Ideology in Politics,’ written around 1955, Oakeshott did not mention Socrates by name, but he did level a withering critique of the classic Socratic question (‘What is x’?). To ask ‘what is justice’? Oakeshott wrote, as if one needs to have a clear definition of it before one can think clearly about how to be just, is to commit a twofold error. First, words like these are not necessarily as simple to define as words like ‘table’ or ‘tree’, and yet we seem perpetually to assume that they are. And when our efforts to define them produce controversy and confusion, we never question our initial assumption: ‘we don’t wonder whether perhaps the enquiry is misconceived; we only think we 274
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haven’t gone far enough with it.’78 Second, even if such words could be defined in a precise and uncontroversial manner, the fact remains that we have no warrant for treating their definition ‘as oracles which ought to tell us what to do, which ought to enable us to triumph over all circumstances.’79 This brings us right back to Oakeshott’s most devastating critique of ideology: ‘general principles are merely short-hand expressions of what we k now to be exceedingly intricate manners of behaviour, never fixed or finished.’80 Stated more fully: As I understand it, in politics, as in everything else—in astronomy, in business and in moral life—we do not begin with an abstract idea but with an activity. We do not begin with the idea of ‘astronomy,’ or ‘honesty’ or ‘justice,’ and then try to find out what object or condition of things is referred to in this ‘idea’ and then set about pursuing it, because in fact we can’t begin in this manner. Instead, what we do is to give way to an impulse to take a certain direction in activity, not knowing at all where it is leading us, and without the necessity of supposing that it is leading us to any specific condition of things. Nobody could know a priori or by any amount of enquiry, what ‘astronomy’ is, or what ‘justice’ is; each of these is an activity—the activity of an astronomer or the activity of a high-court judge—not an ‘object’ to be understood and achieved. 81
Thus, if Socrates were serious about pressing his ‘What is x’? question—if he really thought this were a precondition for human conduct (as opposed to an elenctic device to expose confusion and slow down action, as the present author would interpret it)—then Socrates must have been, on this account, one of the pioneers of rationalism and of the ideological approach to moral-political life. Of course, Oakeshott recognized differences between ancient and modern rationalism, and these differences are by no means trivial. Modern rationalism tried to draw a much more severe line of demarcation between knowledge and opinion than ancient rationalism. For Plato and Aristotle, knowledge was to be attained through opinion. ‘Dialectic’ (literally, reasoning through, or speaking through) began with opinions and endeavoured to purify or transcend them through various processes of intellectual hygiene and intuitive leaps. But dialectic was never understood to be a ‘technique,’ according to Oakeshott, in the way in which Descartes and Bacon understood their modern approach. Nor did the ancients think one had to undergo a complete ‘purge’ of the mind, which, for Oakeshott, also marks the modern approach. Yet what is crucial to notice at this point is that whatever the notable differences between ancient and modern rationalism as Oakeshott construed them, one thing was the same. The effort to proceed by abstraction—to look for some kind of saving principles that might tell a person once and for all how to conduct oneself in the world—was common to both ancient and modern rationalism. In other words, and as Oakeshott says explicitly, both forms of rationalism engaged in ‘ideological thinking,’ with all the problems this entails.82 This at least was Oakeshott’s view as it emerged in his essays (published and unpublished) from the late 1940s into the 1950s. I shall note that prior to this time, he was significantly less critical of rationalism, if he was critical of it at all. For instance, his 1939 book, The Social and Political Doctrines of Contemporary 275
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Europe, contains no hint that ‘doctrines’ are problematic per se. And the lengthy section of that book on Catholic Social Teaching in particular speaks approvingly of the way various writers from Aquinas to Pius XI distilled the tradition of Catholic political thought into condensed doctrinal statements. But by the postwar years, Oakeshott was suddenly focused on rationalism and its instrument, ideology. In fact he worked like a surgeon probing deeper and deeper for clear margins beneath a festering tumour. And like the doctor who fears he may be the bearer of bad news, Oakeshott worried that his patient might not survive the ordeal. He traced the phenomenon of ideology to the roots of philosophy in the West. What hope could there be, then, for a non-ideological style of politics today? Significance of Oakeshott on ideology
Oakeshott’s critique of ‘ideology’ shares some features with other prominent 20thcentury critiques. He shows readers that ideologies present the world reductively and that they are dangerous in the moral and political domains because their adherents expect the world to conform to rules that are overly simplistic. And when the world refuses to countenance the reductive system, the ideologue tends to blame others or the world itself, rather than to doubt his own manner of thinking and acting. But Oakeshott’s critique of ideology is unique both because of the peculiar way he defines it and also because of its historical sweep. A typical way of criticizing ideology in the 20th century was to view it as a relatively modern phenomenon—a derailment of some sort from the tracks European nations had been on before— and to imply therefore that it might be corrected by turning back to an earlier time, recovering an earlier understanding of politics. This was, for example, how Eric Voegelin approached the problem of ideology. He thought ‘modern scientism’ was the trigger, as it were, that made modern ideology possible.83 Similarly, Hannah Arendt in her magisterial Origins of Totalitarianism, though she differed from Voegelin in significant ways, nevertheless agreed that ideologies were ‘a very recent phenomenon,’ and used a historical (as well as a phenomenological) method to point a way beyond them.84 Against this backdrop Oakeshott’s analysis is unique in suggesting that to discover a time ‘before ideologies’ would be much harder than it seems. He explicitly rejects, for instance, the idea that our ideological politics today stem from the birth of modern science or the everincreasing presence of scientists in politics.85 Because the problem of ideology goes so far back not only into American and European history but also into the history of the West, it is hard to see how one can steer a course around it. Indeed, one is inclined to say that ideology as Oakeshott understood it is not an historical development so much as a permanent psychological propensity of man. And thus, similarly, the remedy would not be found by glancing backwards in time at all, but rather in examining ourselves and considering what it really means to think and act, both individually and collectively. 276
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In general, Oakeshott held a more sceptical and pessimistic vision than other 20th-century writers when it came to ‘cures’ for ideological politics. He did not think the problem was going away anytime soon. He seemed to believe, on the contrary, that it was getting worse—both in the sense of becoming more deeply engrained and also in the sense of spreading like a cancer to more and more areas of human endeavour. I know of only one place in his writing where this pessimistic vision appears to recede, and it is worth quoting the passage in full—even though it is a lengthy one—in order to ask what, if anything, it might represent in Oakeshott’s thinking about the problems of ideology for our future. The passage appears in his essay ‘The voice of conversation in the education of mankind’ (c.1948) from which I have quoted already: Politics occur when men apply their intelligence to the arrangements of a society. In this sense the Middle Ages were blessed with little or no politics. It all began, so far as we are concerned, when our civilization was seized with an unholy rage to reform. And when religion was to be recast from the bottom up according to new dogmatic principles, it was not to be expected that the rest of the arrangements of society should be exempt from the visitation of this plague. Dogmatic politics appeared; and Europe, unprepared for this onslaught, was over-run by the barbaric armies of abstract intelligence. But just when the over-night inventions of a people drunk with the wine of abstract ideas (being used only to the small-beer of custom) threatened to return the world to primeval chaos, mankind was saved by the perception that politics, alone among the subjects of discourse, belongs solely to the realm of conversation: dogmatic intelligence was met by conversational intelligence, and what we now call ‘politics’ is the by-product of this encounter. To whom we owe this perception is a secret lost in the obscurity of the past. But whoever he was, he was certainly a second Prometheus for whom the world waited for salvation from the fire that the first had poured into the belly of the race. At least, he was the first democrat; and his gift was the gift of oil and wine, the power to neutralize this ideological rage. And the deluge, by which it was intended to turn the dark satanic mills designed to grind out the illusion called ‘social perfection,’ was diverted from its mischievous purpose and set to water a pleasure-garden for the recreation of the race, before it emptied itself harmlessly into the sea when all things are lost in sweet oblivion.86
The essay in which this passage appears was not published during Oakeshott’s lifetime and only appeared in 2004 when Luke O’Sullivan included it in his collection What is History and Other Essays. What should readers make of it? To me it seems like a flight of fancy in which Oakeshott presents a solution to the problem of ideology that has not occurred, and is not likely soon to occur. The solution occurred, as he imagines, when some unsung hero (Oakeshott himself?) came to the realization that politics is better understood on the model of conversation than on the model of problem solving.87 And we are left to imagine that from this initial insight, the cure might spread outwards to other modes of life, so that not only in politics would man feel some relief. But this happy ending flies in the face of what Oakeshott published in ‘Rationalism in Politics.’ There he says not only that the disease is as old as the patient, but also that we should expect no speedy release. Which position represented Oakeshott’s real view? Since nothing like the cure imagined earlier 277
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appears to have occurred, we must conclude, I think, that the position taken in ‘Rationalism in Politics’ was Oakeshott’s real view. But I think we can also see that he held out some hope for the powers of human imagination and the human capacity for conversation. Perhaps eventually these could be used to ignite a practice of politics that would be somewhat more free from the ideological propensities that have tempted mankind since the dawn of time—or at least since the dawn of philosophy in the West. Notes and References 1. On the purported end of ideology, see D. Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion or Political Ideas in the Fifties (Glencoe: Free Press, 1960); see also Eric Voegelin, ‘Liberalism and its history’, Review of Politics, 36(4) (1974), pp. 504–520. 2. On the continued usefulness of ideology as an analytical concept, despite its contested range of meanings, see M. Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); Ideology: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 3. M. Seliger, Ideology and Politics (New York: Free Press, 1976), p. 31, equates Oakeshott’s concept of ideology with his critique of rationalism. H. Williams, Concepts of Ideology (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), pp. 41–47, equates it with Oakeshott’s distinction between ‘practice’ and ‘philosophy,’ which is yet something different. Important exceptions include P. Franco, Michael Oakeshott: An Introduction (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004); T. Nardin, The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001); and R. Grant, Oakeshott (London: Claridge Press, 1990). 4. J. M. Robertson, a Liberal member of British Parliament from 1906 to 1918, presented ‘rationalism’ in its most positive light in his seminal Short History of Free Thought, Ancient and Modern (New York: Macmillan, 1899). In the religious domain, rationalism had advocates such as A. W. Benn, The History of English Rationalism in the Nineteenth Century, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, 1906), and critics such as G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1908). Accounts of rationalism’s significant role in European political history appeared in G. de Ruggiero, The History of European Liberalism, trans., R. G. Collingwood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1927), and H. Laski, The Rise of European Liberalism (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1936). Oakeshott’s critique of rationalism first appeared in ‘Rationalism in politics’, The Cambridge Journal, I, pp. 81–98, 145–157 (1947–1948), and was later republished in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1962). 5. For Oakeshott’s rough appropriation of Weberian ideal typology, see his discussion of ‘identification’ and ‘ideal characters’ in On Human Conduct (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 3–6. 6. Oakeshott, ‘Rationalism in politics’, in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund Press, 1991), p. 7. All quotations from Rationalism in Politics refer to this edition, not to the edition from 1962. 7. L. O’Sullivan (Ed.), Michael Oakeshott: Early Political Writings (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2010), p. 3. 8. O’Sullivan, ibid ., p. 5. 9. O’Sullivan, ibid ., p. 2. 10. Grant, op. cit ., Ref. 3, pp. 25–30. 11. Grant, ibid ., p. 6. 12. See, e.g. E. Voegelin, The New Science of Politics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1952);Science, Politics and Gnosticism (Chicago, IL: Henry Regnery, 1968). 13. Oakeshott, ‘Rationalism in politics’, op. cit ., Ref. 6, pp. 7, 8, 23 (italics added). 14. See O’Sullivan, op. cit ., Ref. 7, pp. 2–3. 15. See Oakeshott, Experience and its Modes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933). For a later variant of this insight, see his essay ‘The voice of poetry in the conversation of mankind’, in Rationalism, op. cit ., Ref. 6, pp. 488–541. An excellent treatment of Oakeshott on modality is Nardin, op. cit ., Ref. 3, chapter 1. 16. Oakeshott, ‘Rationalism in politics’, op. cit ., Ref. 6, p. 16. 17. Oakeshott, ibid ., p. 15. 18. Ludwig von Mises, Liberalismus (Jena: Verlag von Gustav Fischer, 1927), p. 6: ‘Political problems are problems of social engineering, and their solution must be tried in the same way and by the same means that are available to us in solving other technical tasks, through rational reflection and exploration of the given
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19.
20. 21. 22. 23.
24. 25.
26. 27. 28. 29.
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31. 32.
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35. 36. 37. 38. 39.
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conditions. Everything man is and what elevates him above the animal, he owes to reason. Why should he only in politics forgo the use of reason and trust in dark and unclear feelings and impulses?’ Space does not permit quotation from von Mises’ positive embrace of rationalism in section three of his introduction to Liberalismus (ibid ., pp. 5–6), but readers may refer to those pages as further illustration of what Oakeshott meant by the rationalist temper in politics. Oakeshott, ‘Rationalism in politics’, op. cit ., Ref. 6, p. 22. Oakeshott, ibid . Oakeshott, ibid . , pp. 17–18. Oakeshott, ibid ., p. 18. Elsewhere he would stress the religious element. See especially, Oakeshott, ‘The voice of conversation in the education of mankind’, in L. O’Sullivan (Ed.) What Is History and Other Essays (Exeter: Imprint Academics, 2004), p. 195, where he traces rationalism back to the ‘unholy rage to reform,’ thus back to 16th-century religion rather than to 17th-century philosophy. Oakeshott, ‘Rationalism in politics’, op. cit ., Ref. 6., p. 22. See, e.g. Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, op. cit., Ref. 12, chapters 4–6. This is not meant as a dismissal of Voegelin’s work. On the contrary, because ideology is so Protean in character, it allows for (even requires) different angles of analysis, and no one has done more than Voegelin to expose its spiritual aspect—the ways in which it emerges from a spiritual revolt against the human condition as it is given. But there are other dimensions to explore beyond the spiritual. Oakeshott, ‘Rationalism in politics’, op. cit ., Ref. 6, p. 9. Oakeshott, ibid . Oakeshott, ibid . Oakeshott, ibid ., p. 10. I. Berlin offers a strikingly similar critique of the politics of uniformity in his ‘Two concepts of liberty’, in Henry Hardy (Ed.) Isaiah Berlin: Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 199: ‘If I am a legislator or ruler, I must assume that if the law I impose is rational (and I can consult only my own reason) it will automatically be approved by all the members of my society so far as they are rational beings. For if they disapprove, they must, pro tanto, be irrational.’ The subsection of Berlin’s essay called ‘The temple of Sarastro’ (pp. 191–200) reads as a sustained meditation on Oakeshott’s conception of rationalism and the politics of uniformity. Delivered in 1958, the lecture which formed the basis of Berlin’s essay could have easily been influenced by Oakeshott’s essay on rationalism, which first appeared in 1947. See O’Sullivan, op. cit., Ref 7, p. 113; Oakeshott is referring to Spinoza’s Ethics, Bk 4, prop. xxxv. In his introduction, O’Sullivan p. 30, marks a relevant shift in Oakeshott’s thinking about the state. In the 1920s he conceived the state as resting on ‘solidarity of feeling, opinion and belief,’ whereas his view in On Human Conduct is that it rests on mere agreement about the authority of law. G. Santayana, ‘The ironies of liberalism’, in Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (New York: Scribner’s, 1922), p. 181. ´ le´ mens d’ide´ ologie (Paris: Courcier, 1815–1818); for an analysis of Antoine Louis Destutt de Tracy, E which, see E. Kennedy, A Philosophe in the Age of Revolution: Destutt de Tracy and the Origins of ‘Ideology’ (Philadelphia, PA: American Philosophical Society, 1978). See especially Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Die Deutsche Ideologie, written in 1846 but not published until the 20th century. A classic but still valuable analysis of Marx’s concept of ideology is P. Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, G. H. Taylor (Ed.) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 21– 102; see also T. Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso, 1991), pp. 70–91. For Voegelin’s analysis of ideology in terms of spiritual ‘disease’ and ‘revolt,’ see, e.g. Israel and Revelation, in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol. 14 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995–2006), p. 24; see also ‘Wisdom and the magic of the extreme’, in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol. 12, p. 322. Oakeshott, ‘Rationalism in politics’, op. cit ., Ref. 6, p. 41. Oakeshott, ‘Political education’ in Rationalism, op. cit., Ref. 6, p. 55. Oakeshott, ibid ., p. 58. For a slightly more expansive statement of the usefulness of ideologies in ethics and politics, see Oakeshott, ‘Conduct and ideology in politics’, in O’Sullivan (Ed.), op. cit ., Ref. 23, p. 254. Oakeshott, ‘Rationalism in politics’, op. cit ., Ref. 6, p. 14, n. 8, my italics. Oakeshott, ibid ., p. 8; cf. Oakeshott, ‘The Tower of Babel’, in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, op. cit ., Ref. 6, pp. 484–485, where he briefly sketches out the process by which Christianity became an ideology in the third century. Oakeshott, ‘Rationalism in politics’, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, op. cit . , Ref. 6, p. 41. A. MacIntyre, whose account of ‘practices’ in After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984) echoes Oakeshott’s discussion of ‘practical knowledge’ and ‘tradition,’ takes a similar view of the dependence of moral virtues on the traditions from which they emerge; see pp. 1–5, 187–203, 210–211, 256–263.
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david d. corey 41. Oakeshott, ‘Rationalism in politics’, op. cit ., Ref. 6, p. 11. 42. Evidence for this appears in a letter Oakeshott wrote to Karl Popper in 1948, explaining his understanding of rationalism. There he refers to a ‘modified version of Utopianism which picks at one problem of society at a given moment and is prepared to upset the whole of the society in order to get that one problem solved.’ The letter is reprinted in S. Jacobs and I. Tregenza, ‘Rationalism and tradition: the Popper-Oakeshott exchange’, European Journal of Political Theory, 13(1) (2014), pp. 3–24. 43. See Oakeshott, ‘Political discourse’, in Rationalism, op. cit., Ref. 6, pp. 78 –81; readers of Hannah Arendt will recall that she treats this problem as one of the potentially paralyzing risks of political action in The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 236–248. 44. Oakeshott, ‘Political education’, op. cit., Ref. 6, p. 48. 45. Oakeshott, ibid ., p. 51. 46. Franco, op. cit ., Ref. 3, pp. 85 – 92, is excellent on this point; see especially p. 91: ‘Ideological politics are not simply undesirable; they are strictly speaking impossible.’ 47. Freeden, op. cit ., Ref. 2, p. 322. 48. Grant, op. cit ., Ref. 3, pp. 55–56. 49. Grant, ibid ., p. 12. 50. Consider the following passages from Oakeshott, ‘Rationalism in politics’, op. cit . , Ref. 6, pp. 9, 16, 26 (my italics): [The Rationalist] always prefers the invention of a new device to making use of a current and well-tried expedient This is aptly illustrated by the Rationalist’s attitude towards a tradition of ideas. There is, of course, no question either of retaining or improving such a tradition, for both these involve an attitude of submission. It must be destroyed. And to fill its place the Rationalist puts something of his own making—an ideology. The heart of the matter is the pre-occupation of the Rationalist with certainty For example, the superiority of an ideology over a tradition of thought lies in its appearance of being self-contained. How deeply the Rationalist disposition of mind has invaded our political thought and practice is illustrated by the extent to which traditions of behavior have given place to ideologies, the extent to which the politics of destruction and creation have been substituted for the politics of repair, the consciously planned and deliberately executed being considered (for that reason) better than what has grown up and established itself unselfconsciously over a period of time. ´ cs, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (Cambridge, As for instance in G. Luka MA: MIT Press, [1920] 1971). Cf. Nardin, op. cit ., Ref. 3, p. 132; and A. Botwinick, Michael Oakeshott’s Skepticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), p. 121. Cf. Franco, op. cit ., Ref. 3, p. 86, who observes that Oakeshott’s treatment of rationalism is ‘curiously truncated and uncomplicated.’ Oakeshott, ‘Political education’, op. cit ., Ref. 6, p. 58. Oakeshott’s comparison of rationalism’s emergence to that of various architectural styles supports this claim. ‘Gothic’ is not just a style, but a tradition. So too with rationalism. See Oakeshott, ‘Rationalism in politics’, op. cit., Ref. 6, pp. 17–18; and cf. ‘Conduct and ideology in politics’, op. cit ., Ref. 37, pp. 252–253. For example, Marx and Engels—whom Oakeshott calls ‘the authors of the most stupendous of our political rationalisms’—came by their disposition less through the written teachings of thinkers like Hegel and Feuerbach than by apprenticing under Bruno Bauer, the charismatic Young Hegelian. And though they eventually broke with Bauer (just as they broke from the idealism of Hegel and Feuerbach) the teacher’s impact lingered on. One cannot break with a teacher as easily as one breaks with a teaching. Oakeshott, ‘Rationalism in politics’, op. cit ., Ref. 6, p. 34. Oakeshott, Ibid ., p. 16. In his private notebooks from the period, he writes: ‘Rationalism. The project of turning the “public schools” into special boarding schools for children from broken[?] homes, in need of psychiatric attention, deprived children, etc. What the “rationalist” does not understand is that this is the complete destruction of “public schools”; he thinks of it as a useful adaptation. The public schools are a product of a certain sort of culture. Their distinctive virtues spring from a certain sort of education related to the children who come to them from a certain sort of home. These are counterparts of one another: the school would not exist with, at any rate, a dominant child of this sort.’ My copy of The Complete LSE Notebooks is a digital transcript prepared by Luke O’Sullivan and circulated privately. The entry appears on p. 78. Some excerpts from the Notebooks will appear in print later this year as L. O’Sullivan and R. Grant (Eds), Michael Oakeshott: Notebooks and Letters 1922– 90 (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2014). Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (London: Routledge, [1944] 2001), which was a popular version of the second volume of his treatise, The Abuse and Decline of Reason, offered a trenchant critique of British collectivism . . .
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51. 52. 53. 54. 55.
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57. 58. 59.
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oakeshott’s concept of ideology and planning. Similarly, Popper’s essay, ‘Utopia and violence’, The Hibbert Journal 16 (1948), pp. 109– 116, reprinted in Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, 4th ed. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), distinguished between ‘true rationalism’, which Popper endorsed, and the ‘false rationalism’ of utopian collectivists. Popper sent an early version of this paper to Oakeshott at Cambridge, and they corresponded about the similarities and differences between their understandings of rationalism. See Jacobs and Tregenza, op. cit ., Ref. 42. 61. Oakeshott, ‘Rationalism in politics’, op. cit ., Ref. 6, p. 5. 62. Oakeshott, ibid ., p. 26. 63. The Road to Serfdom, op. cit ., Ref. 60, is an effective critique of rationalism and uses the term itself in much the way Oakeshott would (see p. 220). Later, Hayek would offer a more explicit analysis of rationalism in The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1960), chapter 4. 64. Oakeshott, ‘Rationalism in politics’, op. cit ., Ref. 6, p. 31. 65. For an excellent weighing of the rationalist and traditionalist interpretations of the American Revolution, see L. Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1955), pp. 47 – 50. Hartz’s view was that the Americans were something virtually unrecognizable from the European perspective: a blend of traditionalism and rationalism: ‘Were they rationalists or were they traditionalists? The truth is, they were neither, which is perhaps another way of saying they were both. Radicalism and conservatism have been twisted entirely out of shape by the liberal flow of American history.’ 66. Oakeshott, ‘Rationalism in politics’, op. cit ., Ref. 6, p. 33; the passage is from John Jay’s ‘Charge to the Grand Jury of Ulster County, September 9, 1777.’ Hayek also took exception to Oakeshott’s interpretation of America’s Founding. In his The Constitution of Liberty, pp. 473 – 474, Hayek countered Oakeshott’s quotation from John Jay with one from John Dickinson: ‘Experience must be our only guide. Reason may mislead us. It was not Reason that discovered the singular and admirable mechanism of the English Constitution. It was not Reason that discovered the odd and in the eye of those who are governed by reason, the absurd mode of trial by Jury. Accident probably produced these discoveries, and experience has given a sanction to them. This then is our guide.’ 67. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, op. cit ., Ref. 63, p. 473, n. 33. 68. Oakeshott, ‘Rationalism in politics’, op. cit ., Ref. 6, p. 32. 69. Oakeshott, ibid ., p. 28 70. Oakeshott, ibid ., p. 30. 71. Oakeshott, ibid ., p. 32. Many Locke scholars (including myself) will disagree with this characterization of Locke’s text, especially those who understand something of the way Locke’s ideas changed over time in light of changed circumstances on the ground. 72. Ibid ., p. 18, my italics. In Oakeshott’s notebooks, soon to be published by O’Sullivan, a brief entry reads: ‘There is a story, appended to the account of St Francis preaching to the Saracens, in which the Sultan, the King of Egypt, “asked him in secret to entreat God to reveal to him, by some miracle, which is the best religion”.’ ‘Rationalism’ did not begin with Descartes. 73. Oakeshott, ‘The voice of conversation’, op. cit., Ref. 23, p. 195. This unpublished essay was written in or around 1948, thus during the same period as ‘Rationalism in politics,’ though perhaps a year or two later. 74. Oakeshott, ‘The Tower of Babel’, op. cit ., Ref. 39, p. 485. 75. Oakeshott, ibid . 76. Oakeshott, ‘Political discourse’, op. cit ., Ref. 43, p. 82. 77. See Oakeshott, ‘Rationalism in politics’, op. cit ., Ref. 6, p. 20; ‘Political discourse’, op. cit ., Ref. 6, pp. 82– 85; On Human Conduct , op. cit ., Ref. 5, pp. 27–31, 49; and Experience and its Modes, op. cit ., Ref. 15, p. 321. See also G. Callahan, ‘Michael Oakeshott on rationalism in politics’, The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty ´ Lui: The perplexities of being Michael (January/February 2009), p. 28; and D. Spitz, ‘A Rationalist Malgre Oakeshott’, Political Theory, 4(3) (1976): 335– 352, especially pp. 335 –337. 78. Oakeshott, ‘Conduct and ideology in politics’, op. cit ., Ref. 37, p. 249. In terms of O’Sullivan’s thesis about Oakeshott’s ‘self-critique,’ this passage seems to redress Oakeshott’s own emphasis on definition from his early days of Idealism. See O’Sullivan, op. cit., Ref. 7, pp. 6 –7. 79. Oakeshott, ‘Conduct and ideology in politics’, op. cit ., Ref. 37, p. 250. 80. Oakeshott, ibid ., p. 251. 81. Oakeshott, ibid ., p. 250. 82. Oakeshott, ‘Political discourse’, op. cit ., Ref. 43., pp. 82–83. 83. See Eric Voegelin, ‘The origins of scientism’, in The Collected Works, Vol. 10, op. cit ., Ref. 34, esp. p. 190; and ‘Immortality: experience and symbol’, in The Collected Works, Vol. 12, op. cit ., Ref. 34, p. 75. 84. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1951), p. 468. The historical and phenomenological approach towards a remedy is on display in, for instance, The Human Condition, op. cit ., Ref. 43. . . .
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david d. corey 85. Oakeshott, ‘Rationalism in politics’, op. cit ., Ref. 6, p. 34. 86. Oakeshott, ‘The voice of conversation’, op. cit ., Ref. 23, p. 195. 87. Oakeshott famously used the metaphor of conversation to describe the interaction of different modes or ‘voices’ within a civilization. See, e.g. Oakeshott, ‘The study of politics in a university’, in Rationalism, op. cit ., Ref. 6, pp. 187 – 188; ‘Political education’, op. cit., Ref. 6, pp. 62 – 63; and ‘The voice of poetry in the conversation of mankind’, Rationalism, op. cit ., Ref. 6, pp. 489–491, 497, 535. In his correspondence with Popper (see Ref. 42), Oakeshott also claims that politics is best understood on the model of conversation, an idea Popper found very appealing.
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