The illusion that there is arises from privileging what counts as reasonable within a given mode and denigrating what is considered reasonable in other modes. A conversational as opposed to argumentative juxtaposition of modal voices is respectful of differences and for that reason inherently civilized, which means that to insist on the primacy of any single mode is not only boorish but barbaric.
And because the modes are independent of one another, and none is more expressive of an imagined mode-independent reality than any other, there can be no hierarchy of modes. In making these points, Oakeshott differs from philosophical Idealists in Germany, Italy, and England who were proposing similar categorial schemes around the same time. These include Benedetto Croce, who distinguishes the theoretical modes of art, history, and philosophy from the practical modes of economics and ethics, and R.
Philosophy proper is the most critical of all because it aims to transcend the other forms Collingwood ; Connelly Oakeshott, partly in response to Collingwood, folds art and religion into practice, denies that modes can be ordered hierarchically, and defines philosophy as the activity of interrogating presuppositions, including its own, and therefore not itself a mode.
The idea of a hierarchy of modes is not particular to Idealism. Where there are different understandings, someone interested in reconciling them might argue that they represent different levels of understanding, some more inclusive and in that sense higher than others.
In this respect he has more in common with Wilhelm Dilthey, who struggled with the issue of relativity in metaphysics and how to distinguish the human from the natural sciences, than with the British Idealists—Bradley, Bosanquet, and McTaggart among others—with whom he is often associated Boucher For Oakeshott, all knowledge is conditional.
It is the belief that an action or policy is rational only when it rests on knowledge whose truth can be demonstrated. Its error is thinking that correct decisions can be made simply by applying rules or calculating consequences. Technical knowledge is knowledge, whether of facts or rules, that is easily learned and applied, even by those who are without experience.
It is acquired by engaging in an activity and involves judgment in handling facts or rules RP 12— Knowledge often involves an element of rule-following but using rules skillfully or prudently means going beyond the instructions they provide.
This holds for collective as well as individual decisions and for political as well as private ones. But if technical knowledge has limits, so does traditional knowledge. We cannot conclude that experience and judgment are infallible: clearly, they are not. Political deliberation occurs when a public decision needs to be made and a proposed course of action defended. But deciding which course of action to pursue involves more than simply applying rules or calculating costs and benefits.
It requires interpretation and judgment. We must decide which rule to use and then interpret what it means in a given situation.
If, alternatively, we choose an action based on its likely consequences, we must judge the expected value of those consequences, and this involves making value judgments as well as estimating probabilities. Whether we are applying rules or calculating outcomes, we must work with what we presume to be facts, though these are always uncertain in various ways. For these reasons, there is never a demonstrably correct course of action. Political arguments cannot be proved or disproved; they can only be shown to be more or less convincing than other such arguments.
Political discourse, then, is a discourse of contingencies and conjectures, not of certainties or context-independent truths. It is persuasive and rhetorical, not a matter of demonstration or proof RP 70— These are familiar points, made by Oakeshott with particular clarity. His conclusions rest on a dissection of ideological politics, which, Oakeshott thought, reflects a characteristically modern disposition to substitute rules—which can be moral, historical, scientific, or divine—for judgment in practical reasoning.
The rules that are thought to govern practice are not independent of practical activity but abstracted from it. To borrow language from Michael Walzer, they are interpretations rather than discoveries or inventions Walzer And what they interpret are ways of doing things:.
RP Rationalists, unaware of the local origins of the universal principles that they imagine they have identified, reject knowledge gained through experience in favor of something they call reason or science. Whether deductive or computational, this abstract reason is thought to guarantee greater certainty than experience and judgment can provide.
The fallacy of Rationalism, in other words, is that the knowledge that it identifies as rational is itself really a product of experience and judgment.
It consists of rules, methods, or techniques abstracted from practice—tools that, far from being substitutes for experience and judgment, cannot be effectively used in their absence. In his essays on Rationalism, Oakeshott discusses many examples of ideological politics.
He dissects the rhetorical strategies of Locke, Bentham, and Marx and takes contemporaries to task for thinking that political conclusions can be extracted from religious or scientific principles or from what are believed to be the lessons of history.
Marxism, for example, claims that laws of historical change can be discerned scientifically and practical guidance derived from them. But the claim should be understood as a rhetorical one that can persuade only those who already believe it Oakeshott — In his Lectures in the History of Political Thought Oakeshott — and On Human Conduct OHC — , he discusses the arguments of Francis Bacon, the German Cameralists, and others who impute some collective purpose to the state as an enterprise for promoting some particular substantive goal.
This goal might be religious, economic, imperial, or therapeutic. Bacon, for example, argues that the purpose of government is to exploit nature, which implies mobilizing labor for the sake of collective welfare—an implication explored and developed by later thinkers, often but not only those identified as socialist.
In each case, the collective goal is tied to an ideology that professes to offer guidance for how to achieve the goal. These explorations of ideological politics took Oakeshott in two directions. One, discussed in Section 4 below, was to distinguish alternative understandings of the modern European state, each of which could appear as either an analytical concept or an ideology.
Heidegger treats practical experience not as one mode of understanding among others but as the primordial experience from which nothing human can free itself. For pragmatists from Peirce to Rorty, ideas arise from our relationship to nature, which is how it affects us and our projects. For critical theorists, all theorizing is determined by the practical concerns that motivate it and is therefore implicitly if not explicitly prescriptive.
Even philosophy is practical, at least when it deals with ethics and politics, for those who offer practical guidance under the labels of normative or applied ethics. Moral philosophy, they argue, aims primarily to judge and guide conduct and only secondarily and instrumentally to understand it. A similar point is made about political philosophy. Oakeshott worked hard to rebut the argument that political philosophy is inherently and unavoidably practical.
Not only is it possible to distinguish political philosophy from its object, political activity, but its claim to being philosophical demands that the distinction be recognized. It is concerned to understand and explain, not to prescribe. Just as a theory of jokes is not itself a joke OHC 10 , a theory of morality is not itself a morality. In doing, whatever reflection takes place involves deliberating about what to do.
The theorizing that distinguishes genuine historical and scientific inquiry from pseudo-history or pseudo-science is not action-oriented and prescriptive but explanatory. What distinguishes philosophical from historical or scientific inquiry is that philosophy is more critical in examining the presuppositions of inquiry: where scientists or historians want to get on with their work, the philosopher is concerned to problematize that work and to examine the experience of thinking itself.
Political philosophy, then, is properly philosophical when it examines the presuppositions of political activity. An objection to distinguishing theory and practice in this way is that it treats as categorial a distinction better understood as one of degree.
Political theory is messy. It involves describing and judging, explaining and prescribing, and it is not always clear where one begins and the other ends. But the objection affirms rather than denies the distinction. This is not to say that it cannot be challenged, but to push the discussion further we must rethink the terms involved, for example by defining practical reasoning as reasoning that results in changes in belief as well as action Wallace For Oakeshott, philosophy is distinctive because it questions rather than uses other kinds of knowledge.
Theorizing politics is therefore not the same as engaging in politics, and to the extent that theorizing is itself political it loses its distinctive character. The irony of critical theory is that there must be things of which it is uncritical in order to do what it purports to do: one cannot question and act at the same time.
The contribution of political philosophy, for Oakeshott, is not to generate ideologies or recommend policies but to understand political activity in terms of its assumptions. The knowledge it generates, moreover, is always provisional.
Because scientific or historical knowledge is also provisional, this might seem to blur the distinction between philosophy and other kinds of inquiry.
But philosophy is distinguished by its relentlessness in questioning presuppositions: it is an inquiry. OHC For the philosopher, it means leaving politics and even political philosophy behind to pursue other concerns.
For the study of politics to be genuinely philosophical, Oakeshott thought, it must exchange the vocabulary of political activity for one that explains politics in other terms—different terms from those to be explained.
But this can lead to misunderstanding because the vocabularies are not interchangeable. If we apply the idea of enterprise association to the state, we necessarily generate a conception of it as a corporate undertaking. Civil association, in contrast, implies a state whose laws leave citizens free to pursue their own self-chosen purposes: a state premised on the independence of those associated and therefore committed to resisting the domination that occurs in private life when some impose their preferences on others and in public affairs when the state itself is organized to impose a collective purpose on everyone.
For this to work there must be limits to the pursuit of individual purposes, and in civil association these are understood as limits that enjoin respect for the freedom of all. Civitas is a mode of association in which cives are related to one another as fellow subjects of common laws and in which the laws based are noninstrumental. An obvious objection to this view is that a state needs instrumental as well as noninstrumental laws; no state can function without issuing orders and framing policies to secure compliance, raise revenue, defend itself against enemies, and so forth.
Oakeshott would not disagree. Any actual state is a mixture of formal and substantive elements, procedures and policies, civil and enterprise association. These are attributes of a state that determine its civil character and distinguish it from states in which that character is recessive or even suppressed, as in a despotism. Cives are united in their recognition of the authority of lex and of the obligations it prescribes. The law identified as lex constrains citizens in the same way that Hobbes said hedges constrain travelers: keeping them on the roads without prescribing their destinations Leviathan , ch.
To say that the laws in a civitas are authoritative is to say that their recognition as law is independent of whether cives approve of the obligations they prescribe. In an actual state, however, the public concern includes substantive goods that follow from or are needed to sustain the rule of law, for it is the rule of law that defines the civil condition. These goods, as Kant and others have observed, might include policing, roads, schools, hospitals, and social security Ripstein chs.
There is, in short, ample room for welfare concerns within the civil condition, once the idea of civil association is brought down to earth. Underlying the theory of civil association that he develops in these works is a distinction between two modes of human relationship, one moral and the other prudential. Political Science becomes ideology; it is problem-solving outside of habit or tradition; its professors write the cookbooks for the young men who are wasting their lives in the bureaucracy.
No doubt, both England and America must start over their university teaching of politics. If we should classify conservatives, our taxonomy would surely include people like Michael Oakeshott, a hard-headed man of activity and fact, a great critic of the illusions of liberal, copybook rationalism, and a defender of the tradition of freedom in his world of political experience.
From the earliest days of his emergence, the Rationalist has taken an ominous interest in education. But what is this education in which the Rationalist believes?
It is certainly not an initiation into the moral and intellectual habits and achievements of his society, an entry into the partnership between present and past, a sharing of concrete knowledge; for the Rationalist, all this would be an education in nescience, both valueless and mischievous.
It is a training in technique, a training, that is, in the half of knowledge which can be learnt from books when they are used as cribs. He sincerely believes that a training in technical knowledge is the only education worth while, because he is moved by the faith that there is no knowledge, in the proper sense, except technical knowledge.
Francis G. Stay informed and enjoy the latest writings of the University Bookman by joining our email list. Your Name. Your E-mail. Oakeshott and Conservatism Jan 30, Liberty Fund, ] I t is a pleasure to have Professor Oakeshott on my side, even though there are moments when I have trouble in understanding just where his verbal missile is directed.
Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics. Search Search for:. Or the opposite? Oakeshott would surely have insisted upon the latter, and he could find support for that view from many other quarters. Russell Kirk liked to cite a phrase of H.
The lapse into ideology is a perennial danger for conservatism, as for any other modern political or social disposition, and there is even a danger that it can harden into a form of rationalism.
Here is one place where the voice of Oakeshott can be of great help to us, in reminding those who associate themselves with conservatism that they betray their calling if they allow this hardening to occur unchallenged, and wed themselves to the application of abstract propositions without a consideration of the context and contingencies that affect their application.
And his voice can remind them that prudential nimbleness and openness are things very different from unprincipled opportunism. L et me here add a qualifier. There is probably something to that assertion, but I would prefer to put it a little differently. I believe Oakeshott is best understood at least within American conservatism as a corrective thinker rather than a foundational one. If he were a boxer, he would be a counterpuncher.
One evidence of that is the fact that one would have trouble giving an account of his thought without first explaining the rationalist teachings and institutions against which his writing has been deployed, not only presupposing their existence but granting their unfortunate and often malign influence. The corrective will always be needed. This not a derogation of him, since it was never his intention to offer us a new and improved monism. On the contrary, there is instead in Oakeshott always a very powerful sense of the writer himself as but one voice in a world of various other voices, whose conformity with one another is neither possible nor desirable.
This is where the concept of conversation , so central to Oakeshott, comes into play, and is very illuminating and useful. Our participation in that conversation is to be regarded as an end in itself, not the means to some other end, and not an activity incidental to our human nature, let alone as a reluctant accommodation to an imperfect world.
And it is by its nature something that requires a certain freedom and spontaneity to thrive. All that said, though, it would be a mistake to argue that we can or should expunge the teleocratic impulse altogether. That too is part of our striving human nature, and to strive too earnestly to eliminate striving would be very nearly a self-contradictory act, as absurd as it is impossible. It is one thing to warn against the dangers of high-order utopianism; it is another to become too programmatic, too—dare I say too rationalist—in rooting out rationalism in all its manifestations.
This is to commit the kind of act that Oakeshott warns about, in his famous barb directed at Hayek, whose plan for an unplanned society he deemed to be itself guilty of embodying a kind of planning. And that is the way that conversation implies the central importance of proper scale in healthy human associations. Let me mention another, which follows logically, and is I think absolutely central to Oakeshott.
A conservatism that fails to resist that relentlessly instrumentalizing tendency is all too likely to succumb to it in one way or another, perhaps by emphasizing the degree to which the person is or can be self-made, thereby allowing the supposed primacy of the will to tyrannize over all other aspects of existence.
Something of what I am trying to credit to Oakeshott here was also memorably stated by another unassimilated figure in the American conservative tradition, George Santayana.
Santayana gave this lecture in Berkeley in , and it seems somehow appropriate to invoke it here in Colorado Springs, with its even more spectacular landscape:. A Californian whom I had recently the pleasure of meeting observed that, if the philosophers had lived among your mountains, their systems would have been different from what they are.
Certainly, I should say, very different from what those systems are which the European genteel tradition has handed down since Socrates; for these systems are egotistical; directly or indirectly they are anthropocentric, and inspired by the conceited notion that man, or human reason, or the human distinction between good and evil, is the centre and pivot of the universe.
That is what the mountains and the woods should make you at last ashamed to assert. He had an impressive career but somehow outside the mainstream, was remembered by friends like Ken Minogue as a splendid friend who cared about friendship deeply, eschewed honors, and was happy to retire in Dorset and lead a county life.
Oakeshott is not very popular among libertarians, either. Libertarians may be wary of him for a few, understandable reasons: he was a British idealist that smells of Hegel! When conservatives came back to power, things did not change much.
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