George Feaver, Times Literary Supplement (7 May 2004)

Efraim Podoksik, In Defence of Modernity:  Vision and Philosophy in Michael Oakeshott, viii + 260 pp.  Imprint Academic. ₤25/$40. 0907845 665

Ian Tregenza, Michael Oakeshott on Hobbes:  A Study in the Renewal of Philosophical Ideas, ix + 244 pp.  Imprint Academic. ₤25/$40.  0907845 592

Roy Tseng, The Sceptical Idealist:  Michael Oakeshott as a Critic of the Enlightenment, x + 320 pp.  Imprint Academic. ₤25/$40.        0907845 223

In the year of Michael Oakeshott’s death Lord Annan saw fit to depict him, in Our Age: The Generation that Made Post-war Britain, as a figure who, like Evelyn Waugh and F.R. Leavis, would be best remembered as a “Deviant” who “taught our successors how to rough us up.”  But the persisting attention accorded Oakeshott’s thought has in retrospect tended to blunt the thrust of Annan’s mordant wit.  More of Oakeshott’s work, a good deal of it previously unpublished, is in print today than in his lifetime.  His major writings have been translated, including a compilation of selections from Rationalism in Politics and other Oakeshott essays recently rendered into Chinese by an admirer who is professor of philosophy at Fudan University, Shanghai.  Some nine books and numerous articles elaborating aspects of his thought have come out since his passing and there is a flourishing Michael Oakeshott Association in Britain and abroad.  A biography from Bob Grant with the benefit of unrestricted access to Oakeshott’s extensive private papers at the LSE is in the works.  Additionally, we have the launch of this series on Oakeshott from Imprint Academic.  Four titles have appeared---the three volumes here under review, as well as Luke O’Sullivan’s scrutiny of Oakeshott’s views on history already noticed in the TLS (December 18, 2003).

Michael Oakeshott can thus hardly be said to remain any longer in the shadow of his famed LSE contemporaries, F.A. Hayek and Karl Popper.  The assiduous interest paid to his ideas has also served to draw the recognition of his achievement abreast of that of his once more publicized nemesis, Sir Isaiah Berlin.  All this belies charges of deviancy on Oakeshott’s part.  It also puts to rest a standard complaint of his contemporary detractors that his thought was too insularly English to have broad reach, since a substantial portion of the burgeoning secondary literature on Oakeshott has been produced by sympathetic American scholars.  In the case specifically of the Imprint Academic series, moreover, while one of the authors is British, the others are by turn an Israeli who teaches political theory in Turkey, an Australian, and a Taiwanese hailing from the National Sun Yat-Sen University.  Equally striking perhaps is the acknowledgement by these younger scholars of academic mentors who represent a considerable diversity of approaches to the inherently contentious study of political philosophy.

Overall, Michael Oakeshott has reasonable claims to be regarded as the pre-eminent political philosopher in the British political tradition of the past century.  He achieved a substantial and highly original body of abstract theoretical inquiry and was in addition a political essayist whose stylistic genius alone earned him a place in the rarified company of figures of the caliber of Halifax, Hume, Burke and Coleridge.  And that is not all.  He made distinctive contributions to epistemology, the nature of historical inquiry, and the philosophy of education. Yet as Noel Annan’s irreverent assessment of his contribution illustrates, he bore the burden throughout his lifetime of a blatantly reproving reputation as a conservative or even reactionary figure sadly out of sympathy with the goings-on of the contemporary world.  The polemics he aimed at the vapidity of contemporary British politics in particular led some, unfamiliar with the general philosophical perspective in which he couched his occasional essays, to see him as a Tory dandy.  But he was never a party political man (Mrs. Thatcher offered him a Companionship of Honour, which he turned down).  His problematic standing also had to do with his philosophical approach and the concomitant astringency of his misgivings about rational foundations.  Hegel taught him that philosophers cannot change the world but only understand it, Montaigne, that philosophy was an engagement to abate mystery rather than to achieve certainty.  And he agreed with Wittgenstein that, while the impulse of philosophy is always to renew itself, when its work is done it leaves everything as it is. For Oakeshott, then, the logic of understanding and of doing is in an irreducible sense profoundly conserving.  Each concerns itself with the intimation in human experience of something that is already present in language or in thought.  At the same time, he shared with John Locke an insistence that, in the general philosophy of experience as well as the more practically-minded philosophy of society, we must strive to think systematically while abjuring the false solace of a comprehensive system of knowing.

One attempt to rescue Oakeshott from crude misrepresentations of his views has been to recast him, as have Paul Franco and others, as a theorist who, so far from being hostile to liberalism, offered a contemporary restatement of the contours of the liberal tradition purged of the dogmatic or `rationalist’ reasoning which threatens its ossification.  Efraim Podoksik agrees that Oakeshott stands for “a sort of liberalism”, but suggests his real contribution is more far-reaching, nothing less than a defence of modernity per se, in which liberalism forms a single if important attribute.  Oakeshott, he avers, stands figuratively halfway between foundational conservatives or pre-modernists like Strauss, Voegelin and MacIntyre, and subjectivist post-modernist critics of modernity such as Rorty, Deleuze and Lyotard.  Podoksik’s Oakeshott is a defender of modernity, because he celebrates the radical plurality of knowing that is an undenial characteristic of contemporaneity, because he embraces individuality but does not abandon reasoned standards, and because he rejects the relativism that post-modernists insist must result from the abandonment of the quest for an objective and philosophically justifiable final system of values.  Even more central than Podoksik’s close account of his philosophy of experience, or his respect for practical knowledge, is Oakeshott’s modal insistence on the inherent plurality of human knowing.  Certainly, in Experience and Its Modes (1933), Oakeshott insisted that all experiential cognition occurs in abstract worlds such as history, science, and poetry, modalities of understanding seen respectively in terms of change, stability and delight.  They are homogenous, purposeless and mutually irrelevant. Each world is monistic, but taken together they make up a radical plurality of worlds; and the aim of philosophy, at least in Oakeshott’s early work, is to achieve coherence by overcoming in thought the arrests in experience characteristic of discrete modality.

Now, in Oakeshott’s way of seeing things, the vita contemplativa can claim no hierarchical superiority to the vita activa; and paralleling the Oakeshottian world of experiential understanding is a world of social doing. Podoksik shows how the somewhat problematic notion of practice as a modality of experience in the early work came to be replaced by a concentration on the morality of individuality in Oakeshott’s middle years, and culminated in the mature category of conduct featured in On Human Conduct (1975).  In his later thought, conduct is seen to entail not a coherent whole but a multiplicity of abstract identities, and this required a new emphasis on agency wherein modern identity is something understood as self-chosen, the historical achievement of a character on the part of reflective intelligences ceaselessly engaged in acts of self-disclosure and self-enactment.  The civic arrangements appropriate to such agency are now theorized by Oakeshott as civil association, the ideal character of a modern state that “bakes no bread” in which, in return for subscribing to non-instrumental postulates of authorization, associates are at liberty to pursue the cultivation of their individuality without hindrance.  In Podoksik’s frame of reference, this Oakeshottian idea of civil association is itself best understood as a central idea of modernity.  His book concludes with a summary rehearsal of Oakeshott’s views on education.  He contends that his influence in the public debate of his day was greater than is often allowed, and indeed, represents a specifically modern perspective positing a moderate middle way between more progressive and authoritarian approaches.  In Oakeshott’s estimation, an education appropriate for moderns involves both instructing and imparting, the nurturing of both our self-recognition as independent individuals pursuing choices of our own and an introduction to the plurality of languages or voices that make up our civilization.  The first of these is the sphere of schooling, as well as vocational studies in the philosophy of society, the second, university studies in the philosophy of experience.  The centrality of education for Oakeshott, as Podoksik suggests, is that, since for him we are what we learn to become, liberal learning sustains our inheritance of modernity, teaching us to cherish and defend the radical plurality of knowing, while accepting that it cannot be strictly-speaking philosophically justified.

It has been a conspicuous feature of western political thought that the voices of its leading theorists have been articulated in metaphoric conversation with one or other of the authors of the major texts of a longstanding canonical tradition.  And, despite the importance in his early writings of Hegelian idealism, the canonical author of greatest influence in the fuller development of Michael Oakeshott’s thought, in the view of Ian Tregenza, is indubitably Thomas Hobbes.  It is perhaps small wonder that Oakeshott should have been drawn to a philosopher who, building on an intellectual inheritance of late scholastic nominalism, was to play so seminal a part in identifying the psychological rudiments of the new individuality of an emergent modern age, and in recommending an audacious philosophical system, and corresponding civil arrangements, appropriate to the circumstances of its appearance.  Oakeshott himself once remarked that Leviathan was “the greatest, perhaps the sole, masterpiece of political philosophy written in the English language.”  Tregenza’s book bears out Podoksik’s claim that Oakeshott provides us with a general defence of modernity, but it also brings closer to the fore Hobbes’ account of authority in the elaboration of Oakeshott’s revisionist view of the philosophical as well as the historical features of the western liberal tradition.  It also calls to mind Gerencser’s claim that Oakeshott’s close engagement with Hobbes’ ideas resulted in the mitigation of the quest for philosophical concreteness of his early idealism, and the more pronounced scepticism on display in his later work.

Tregenza both broadens and modifies this line of interpretation.  According to him, Hobbes was a sort of “seventeenth century alter-ego” for Oakeshott, causing him to set aside his early idealist undertaking to construct a philosophy of knowledge, in which the `arrests’ of the several determinate modes of experience might be finally overcome and coherence achieved, and to replace this in his middle years with a new emphasis on less philosophical concerns.  Already, in his “Introduction” to Hobbes’ Leviathan (1945), Oakeshott had identified three traditions of inquiry in the western political tradition:  Reason and Nature; Will and Artifice; and Rational Will.  Each of them found classic expression in a particular text:  Plato’s Republic; Hobbes’ Leviathan; and Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and Law.  And if his early work owed most to Hegel, it is Tregenza’s position that, philosophically-speaking, Oakeshott’s growing interest in Hobbes led him to gradually relax his rather austere idealist account of modal experience in favour of an accommodation between the Rational Will tradition, once purged of its problematic teleological features, and the Hobbesian world of Will and Artifice.  Beginning with his 1950s Harvard lectures, moreover, when Oakeshott first provided a sketch of what he took to be the major idioms of moral conduct in western civilization---the primarily pre-modern morality of common ties, and the distinctly modern moralities of individuality and collectivism, a more historical reading of his materials came to be substituted for pure philosophical contemplation.  If all experience is present experience seen through the lenses of distinctive and self-contained modalities of understanding, in the further development of Oakeshott’s thought the modalities of history and practice are those deemed more appropriate than philosophy as such to the thinking and acting characteristic of political life.  This feature of his later writings suggests a possible way to account for the apparent tensions, even contradictions, between Oakeshott’s early and mature texts.  Tregenza infers that, without ever entirely abandoning the idealism of his earlier work, Oakeshott was led, under the influence of Hobbes who like him wrote in an uncertain age scarred by unremitting social upheaval and war, to set it to one side.  He did so in order to direct the attention of a late twentieth century audience grown absent-minded about its rich inheritance of western civilization, and liable to take for granted the hard-won blessings of the morality of individuality and civil association, to some timely lessons in Aristotelian phronesis garnered from a renewed consideration of the instructive contours of modern European history.

Roy Tseng invites readers to consider the merits of a rather different interpretative platform from those offered by Podoksik and Tregenza.  He believes that the significance of Oakeshott was as “one of the most substantial critics of the Enlightenment project in the twentieth century.”  Now, the so-called “Enlightenment project” has recently enjoyed a certain vogue among critics of liberalism, who regard it as a derivative of the modernity debate itself.  For Tseng, what it entails is a broad paradigm of modern understanding stretching from Descartes to Kant, a more inclusive historical terrain than that of the eighteenth century French theorists of reason and progress alone. The central features of the Enlightenment project are said, by Tseng, to be philosophical foundationalism, ethical formalism and positivist history.  In obvious contrast, he depicts Oakeshott’s philosophy as non-foundational, his ethics as contingent and sceptical, and his approach to historical understanding as idealist and anti-positivist. Tseng is emphatic that doctrinal liberalism is prominent in the advocacy of the Enlightenment project, and an elaboration of the main attributes of liberalism alongside Oakeshott’s own characteristic ideas leads him to reject outright the case for construing Oakeshott as a liberal.  Among other things, Oakeshott found unsatisfactory the entire range of standard underpinnings for liberal ethical theory, including Lockean natural law, the Kantian categorical imperative, and Millian utilitarianism.  The rationalism of doctrinal liberalism is amply on display in the Enlightenment project’s philosophe (a figure akin to the `theoretician’ Oakeshott held in low regard), who aimed to eradicate the mysteries of the human world by substituting for them the encyclopedic certainty of a new science of applied reason.  Tseng faults liberalism, moreover, for its advocacy of what he terms “radical individualism”; and he compares this unfavourably with Oakeshott’s own “traditionalist individualism”, where individuality and the freedom they reflect are seen, not simply as “ideals” premeditated independently of political experience, but as something presently enjoyed in an ongoing tradition of conduct.  Tseng’s Oakeshott, then, can hardly be described as a doctrinal liberal; but neither ought he to be construed, he insists, as a dogmatic conservative.  He prefers to call him a “sceptical idealist”, and to leave it at that.

The marked differences of emphasis of these three books, as much as their affinities, bear out what has long been observed of Michael Oakeshott, that it is no simple matter to pin him down.  Notwithstanding his stylistic gifts, his way of seeing things conveys an unmistakably elusive aura, like an individual character, indeterminate while at the same time intimating a settled moral equilibrium.  Of one thing concerning Oakeshott, though, there can be little doubt.  His masterful prose induces in the reader the sense of being in the presence of a very English figure, a patriot proud of the British way of life and its contribution to civil association, but disposed to link it philosophically to its place in a broader European civilization. That is why the suggestion of a prominent liberal grandee that he would be best remembered as a deviant, reveals a lot more perhaps about “the generation that made post-war Britain” than about Michael Oakeshott himself.

George Feaver is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of British Columbia.