John Charvet, History of Political Thought 25(3), 2004, pp. 729-730.

Efraim Podoksik, In Defence of Modernity: Vision and Philosophy in Michael Oakeshott (Imprint Academic, 2003) vii + 259, £25/$40, ISBN 0 907845 665.

 This is an excellent and illuminating book. It sets out to understand Oakeshott's writings as parts of a whole vision of modern civilization both as regards theoretical and practical mind and by and large succeeds very well. This conception fits Oakeshott's early work obviously enough but not so obviously the later On Human Conduct. Even in regard to the earlier work Podoksik's book is illuminating in helping us to understand Oakeshott's ideas in relation to the concern of contemporary continental European, as well as that of British, writers  with the (modern) fragmentation of the intellectual and social worlds. Understood in this way, Oakeshott appears very convincingly, not as an anti-modern conservative or even reactionary thinker, but as someone who embraces the fragmented worlds and seeks to teach us how to understand, accept, and enjoy them.

The fragmentation of modern mind and society is contrasted with the pre-modern world understood as organized intellectually and socially in a comprehensive and hierarchical manner. Each mode of thinking and each individual had its place in an ordered whole. With the breakdown of the medieval vision, anarchy threatens intellectually and socially. Podoksik shows convincingly that this is Oakeshott's overall problematic and that his attitude to it is neither to attempt to re-establish hierarchical order nor indulge in despair at the decline of Western civilization but to show how the modern situation can be successfully lived. Oakeshott's basic strategy is to affirm the autonomy and independence of the separate modes (scientific, historical, aesthetic and practical). Each mode has its own categories for organizing a coherent world of experience and the understanding available in each world is properly pursued for its own sake. Furthermore, each mode is irrelevant to the other modes, so that the proper relation between them is one of mutual respect for equal and autonomous entities among whom no cooperation is possible or desirable. In the Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind, Oakeshott describes this relation as a conversation but on Podoksik's persuasive understanding of it, it is a bizarre one in which the participants listen to each other's voices and yet do not engage in any effective interaction and pass each other by. This is indeed, as Podoksik states, a radical or extreme theory of the relation between the modes.

Podoksik argues that Oakeshott's treatment in his early work of the practical world as a mode of experience comparable to the other modes was that part with which Oakeshott was subsequently most dissatisfied and that On Human Conduct is to be understood as the reoganization and development of his ideas in this field.  On the early account, the practical world lacked the inner coherence of the other modes because of its internal division between fact and value and because it was a world that was unavoidable in a way that was not true of the others and this called in question its supposed equal status as an abstract mode. In On Human Conduct Oakeshott resolves these problems by abandoning the idea of practice as an abstract mode comparable to the others. Instead, he makes a more basic distinction between a sphere of understanding which contains the modes and a sphere of doing comprehending practice. On Human Conduct is primarily an account of the presuppositions of the sphere of doing. Neither of the two spheres are in themselves homogeneous wholes - that of understanding contains the independent abstract modes each existing for its own sake while the sphere of doing is composed of independent and autonomous selves existing as ends in themselves.

Oakeshott's theory of civil association is a theorization of society in terms of such selves and is presented by Podoksik as the result of his attempting to achieve a coherence that reflects the character of his thought in general. What is crucial here is that the independent individuals should be part of a civil association and yet should not be mutually constraining any more than the abstract modes are mutually constraining, since each is in himself or itself a homogeneous, autonomous world. This explains why Oakeshott insists that the rules of civil association are not limitations on freedom because they do not require those subject to them to pursue any particular purpose or perform any specific action. They leave the members free to pursue what purposes they please because they constitute only conditions to be observed in the conduct of any action. In a civil association the autonomous individuals are from the point of each person's homogeneous world as irrelevant to each other as the separate homogeneous modes of experience are.

There is, for Oakeshott, no rational necessity for theorizing society or human selves in these ways. They constitute only ways we have come to think of ourselves. Of course, this raises the question of why we should value this way of thinking and continue to think in the same way. Oakeshott has no answer to this question. Even so, we can ask whether Oakeshott's extreme version of a society of autonomous selves is as compelling as some others the modern Western mind has developed. This seems very doubtful.

John Charvet,

London School of Economics