Michael Oakeshott was one of the most important philosophers of the 1900s, but perhaps because he was an Englishman, his work is not very well known in America. That’s a shame. By tracing the deep roots of modern political thought, Oakeshott laid bare the dangers of rationalism—and predicted the divisive politics we see today.
Oakeshott is best known for an essay collection entitled Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays. Published in 1962, it is a considered critique of new trends in political thinking—particularly those that brought socialism to Britain. Yet the core of his argument does not concern political institutions; instead, its focus is the influence that rationalism plays in sweeping away important forms of knowledge.
Oakeshott saw that human beings don’t experience reality directly. Instead, we rely on traditions such as language, culture, and morality to make sense of the world around them. These traditions convey important insights that help people flourish.
Oakeshott worried that the modern obsession with rationalism was blinding people to the role that traditions can play in improving society. By rationalism, Oakeshott referred to the deep-seated tendency that modern people have to plan out systems and seek perfection according to abstract ideals. To a rationalist, there is no good reason to respect a tradition—it is just another idea.
By accepting the rationalist doctrine, modern people opened themselves up to all sorts of tragedies. Totalitarianism, for example, is distinctly rationalist because it abolishes all tradition in order to impose a grand plan on society from the top down. Totalitarians like Lenin always made a point of destroying national traditions on their way to utopia.
Yet what makes Oakeshott so interesting to read is that unlike most critics of the left, he argued that even classical liberalism is just a manifestation of the same rationalist spirit that animates socialism. For example, when F.A. Hayek wrote his grand critique of social justice, The Road to Serfdom, he was hailed as a hero by British and American conservatives alike. Oakeshott’s praise was a bit more reserved:
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 to resistance to tyranny of Rationalism into a self-conscious ideology be considered a strengthening of those resources.
This citation may provide another clue as to why Oakeshott is not widely read today: His sentences are far from snappy. Nevertheless, here Oakeshott explained that resistance to the “tyranny of Rationalism” could become an ideology in its own right—thus contributing to the same rationalism that erodes tradition everywhere.
Of course, like all great philosophers, Oakeshott was clearly committed to reasoning well. But he was not convinced by the claim that politics is a rational activity. Instead, he says politics “is a second-rate form of human activity, neither an art nor a science, at once corrupting to the soul and fatiguing to the mind, the activity of those who cannot live without the illusion of affairs or those so fearful of being ruled by others that they will pay away their lives to prevent it.”
Instead of defending a rational politics of liberty, Oakeshott argued that politics is and should be a passionate affair. In his view, people are embedded in families, cultures, places, and histories. The proper response to these contexts is not cool detachment, but engaged emotion. And when people live passionately in those areas—as they should—political ideology does not take precedence over those dimensions and their traditions.
To Oakeshott, the tragedy of modern politics is that people see ideology as “the gift of salvation itself.” By overemphasizing political life, people make it easier for government power to crowd out tradition. Communities are broken, and their members are dehumanized.
It’s a critique worth remembering as the presidential campaigns kick into high gear.
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Image credit: Flickr (Michael Oakeshott)
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