Abstract
Increasingly recognized as a twentieth-century thinker of the first rank, Michael Oakeshott nevertheless still resists easy categorization. And this is so despite the fact that he has long been recognized as a notable figure in several related intellectual disciplines including the history of ideas, the philosophy of history, and—especially—political philosophy. Indeed, until recently, Oakeshott has often been labelled as a thinker sui generis, difficult to classify and to come to terms with, and even sometimes dismissed as an uncompromising eccentric. Why is this?
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Notes
There is some evidence that Oakeshott was interested in Arendt’s work, in that he reviewed Arendt’s Between Past and Future—see Michael Oakeshott, “Review of Hannah Arendt: Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought,” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 77 (1962), 88–90—and also drew upon her distinction between “action” and “fabrication” from The Human Condition, even if only to dispute it—
see Michael Oakeshott, On Human Conduct (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 35–36.
For some comparisons of the two, see Horst Mewes, “Modern Individualism: Reflections on Oakeshott, Arendt, and Strauss,” The Political Science Reviewer, vol. 21 (1992), 116–47;
Margaret Canovan, “Hannah Arendt as a Conservative Thinker,” in Hannah Arendt: Twenty Years Later, ed. Larry May and Jerome Kohn (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 11–32;
and Helen Banner, “Existential Failure and Success: Augustinianism in Oakeshott and Arendt,” Intellectual History Review, vol. 21 (2011), 171–94. Oakeshott barely mentions the others, although commentators have now begun to make perceptive comparisons.
See, for example, Paul Franco, “Michael Oakeshott as Liberal Theorist,” Political Theory, vol. 18 (1990), 411–36;
Noël O’Sullivan, “Visions of Freedom: the Response to Totalitarianism,” in The British Study of Politics in the Twentieth Century, ed. Jack Hayward, Brian Barry, and Archie Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 63–88;
and Leslie Marsh, “Oakeshott and Hayek: Situating the Mind,” in A Companion to Michael Oakeshott, ed. Leslie Marsh and Paul Franco (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2012) 248–67.
Cf. in particular A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic (London: Victor Gollancz, 1936)
and T. D. Weldon, The Vocabulary of Politics (London: Penguin Books, 1953). The idea that “falsifiability”—rather than verifiability—constitutes the criterion for what is a genuinely scientific (or social scientific) hypothesis was propagated by Karl Popper.
See, for example, Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957).
For classic texts in the modern hermeneutic and pragmatic traditions, see Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London: Sheed and Ward, 1989)
and Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980);
for an attempt to locate Oakeshott’s position in these developments, see Fred Dallmayr, Polis and Praxis: Exercises in Contemporary Political Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984).
For direct comparisons of Oakeshott and Gadamer, see Kenneth B. McIntyre, “Prejudice, Tradition, and the Critique of Ideology: Gadamer and Oakeshott on Practical Reason,” Collingwood and British Idealism Studies, vol. 16 (2010), 136–66,
and Edmund Neill, “Michael Oakeshott and Hans-Georg Gadamer on Practices, Social Science, and Modernity,” History of European Ideas, vol. 40 (2014), 406–436.
For an influential example of the view that there was a recognition of the harmonious (and hierarchical) relationship between different disciplines in the medieval period, see R. G. Collingwood, Speculum Mentis, or, The Map of Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924).
By contrast, for a classic statement of the idea that modernity is defective compared to the ancient world due to its failure to recognize the superiority of the right kind of absolute philosophical knowledge, see Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953).
The argument here is presented in greater detail in my book, especially chapters 2 and 3: see Edmund Neill, Michael Oakeshott (New York: Continuum Press, 2010).
Michael Oakeshott, Experience and its Modes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933), 26.
The distinction that Oakeshott is making in On Human Conduct between the practical and the theoretical, between doing and understanding, had to some extent been prefigured in his earlier essay “Work and Play,” which remained unpublished in his lifetime, but can now be found in Michael Oakeshott, What is History? and Other Essays, ed. Luke O’Sullivan (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2004), 303–14.
See Michael Oakeshott, “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind,” in Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, new and expanded edition (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1991), 488–541.
Thus, 50 years later, Oakeshott makes the same point when he writes that a mode represents neither “merely an attitude or a point of view” but rather “an autonomous manner of understanding… which is logically incapable of denying or confirming the conclusions of any other mode.” Michael Oakeshott, On History and Other Essays (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), 2.
For a very clear account of how Oakeshott’s account of modes develops, see Terry Nardin, The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2001), 128–35.
Michael Oakeshott, “The Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence,” Politica, vol. 3 (1938), 346.
Michael Oakeshott, ed., The Social and Political Doctrines of Contemporary Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1939), xv.
Michael Oakeshott, “The Claims of Politics,” in Michael Oakeshott, Religion, Politics and the Moral Life, ed. Timothy Fuller (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 95.
Oakeshott was almost certainly influenced here by Collingwood’s recently published The Principles of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), not only in his use of the phrase “the corruption of consciousness,” but also more widely by the argument that it was the role of the artist (rather than the politician) to prevent this. To quote Collingwood, the role of the artist “is to speak out… But what he has to utter is not… his own secret… The reason why they need him is that no community altogether knows its own heart; and by failing in this knowledge a community deceives itself on the one subject concerning which ignorance means death… Art is the community’s medicine for the worst disease of the mind, the corruption of consciousness.” Collingwood, Principles of Art, 336.
See, famously, Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Civil Society, ed. and trans. Jose Harris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001),
and Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, ed. and trans. Stephen Kahlberg (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
It is notable that Oakeshott only considers these two alternatives. Partly this can be explained, as indicated, by his strong advocacy of the importance of plurality (and hence of a state to uphold this), but it is difficult to avoid the suspicion that Oakeshott sets the dichotomy up as a polemical contrast. If one rejects the idea that the state must pursue one substantive end in common, he seems to be arguing, then the only alternative is to uphold civil association. This is not obviously true. Oakeshott inspiration for this dichotomy ultimately comes from Otto von Gierke—as Luke O’Sullivan brings out well in his article “Michael Oakeshott on European Political History,” History of Political Thought, vol. 21 (2000), 135–36.
This is in contrast, for example, to one of the texts which Oakeshott cited as a major influence on his political philosophy, namely G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952).
To quote Oakeshott himself—in On Human Conduct, 149: “the recognition of respublica [i.e., the comprehensive conditions of association] which constitutes civil association is neither approval of the conditions it prescribes nor expectations about the enforcement of these conditions; it is recognizing it as a system of law.” For Hart’s classic statement of legal positivism, which Oakeshott’s position here resembles, see H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), especially chapters 2–4.
See Ibid., 153, n.l. It is important to stress, however, that the degree to which laws can be related to one another systematically will always be limited—on the contrary, the relationship will always be to some extent imprecise, under-determined, and slightly ramshackle. So, Oakeshott argues, there can never be fully universal criteria for diagnosing what makes laws authoritative, let alone one fundamental unquestionable norm from which all the other laws obtain their authority, as Hans Kelsen above all famously argued—in, for example, Hans Kelsen, Pure Theory of Law, second ed., trans. Max Knight (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1989).
This charge is neatly summed up by Judith Shklar’s description of Cold War liberalism as “The Liberalism of Fear,” in Nancy L. Rosenblum, ed., Liberalism and the Moral Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).
Obviously this selection does not exhaust potential candidates to be Cold War liberals, even amongst prominent postwar thinkers—F. A. Hayek is just one other plausible candidate. However, as I argue below, there are good reasons to suggest that he (like Oakeshott) differs from the Cold War liberals on several important points. In general, my account of Cold War liberalism borrows heavily from an excellent article on the subject by Jan-Werner Müller—see his “Fear and Freedom: On ‘Cold War Liberalism,’” European Journal of Political Theory, vol. 7 (2008), 45–64. For a reading of Oakeshott and the others that concentrates more on examining their relationship with postwar positivism, see Edmund Neill, “The Impact of Positivism: Academic Social and Political Thought in Britain, c. 1945–70,” History of European Ideas, vol. 39 (2013), 51–78.
See, for example, A. J. Ayer, “Man as a Subject for Science,” in Philosophy, Politics, and Society: Third Series, ed. Peter Laslett and W. G. Runciman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), 6–24.
See, for example, C. A. R. Crosland, The Future of Socialism (London: Jonathan Cape, 1956)
and Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). It is true that both of these texts are more concerned to prove that Marxism (rather than political ideas in general) had become redundant. But equally both took the value of technocratic welfare state capitalism as a given. In Crosland’s case, this led him to take economic growth (and the desirability of the postwar British state) for granted when arguing for equality; in Bell’s case it led him to reject the importance of noneconomic arguments for equality—as evidenced by his subsequent splenetic dismissal of the value of the “new social movements” of the 1960s. See Crosland, Future of Socialism, 515; Bell, End of Ideology, 425–33.
See Strauss, Natural Right and History, and also Leo Strauss, What is Political Philosophy? and Other Studies (Glencoe: Free Press, 1959).
As Müller notes, however, they all took Marx seriously, devoting considerable time to discussing his work. See, for example: Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1939);
Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), vol. 2, The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx, and the Aftermath;
Raymond Aron, Main Currents of Sociological Thought, trans. Richard Howard and Helen Weaver (New York: Anchor Books, 1968), vol. 1: Montesquieu, Comte, Marx, de Tocqueville, and the Sociologists and the Revolution of 1848.
As Berlin puts it: “If we ask the Kantian question, ‘In what kind of world is political philosophy—the kind of discussion and argument in which it consists—in principle possible?’ the answer must be ‘Only in a world where ends collide.’” See Isaiah Berlin, “Does Political Theory Still Exist?” in Philosophy, Politics and Society: Second Series, ed. Peter Laslett and W. G. Runciman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1964), 8.
This ideal was explicitly linked to a British model of government and society by all three thinkers. For the importance of benign traditions, see, for example, Karl Popper, “Towards a Rational Theory of Tradition,” in ibid., Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 161–82.
Aron somewhat regretfully commented that he was “personnellement, keynésien avec quelque regret du libéralisme.” (See Raymond Aron, L’Opium des Intellectuels [Paris: Hachette Littérature, 2002], 10.)
Popper’s social democratic commitments are usefully highlighted in Bryan Magee, Popper (London: Fontana Press, 1985), 85 and passim.
See Raymond Aron, “La définition libérale de la liberté,” Archives Européennes de Sociologie, vol. 2 (1961), 199–218,
and his “Liberté, libérale ou libertaire?” in Raymond Aron, La liberté et l’ordre social: Textes des conférences et des entretiens organises par les Rencontres Internationales de Geneva (Neuchâtel: Editions de la Baconniere, 1969), 67–112.
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Neill, E. (2015). Oakeshott, Modernity, and Cold War Liberalism. In: Nardin, T. (eds) Michael Oakeshott’s Cold War Liberalism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137507020_3
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