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Michael Oakeshott and the Political Economy of Freedom
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15026 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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9 / 1988 |
4,743 Words |
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John Gray
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In the work of Michael Oakeshott we find a decisive critique of contemporary rationalism and its offspring in modern collectivism. Yet Oakeshott's thought is subtle and sometimes hermetic in its expression, and his critique of contemporary life is often oblique and cryptic. In order to understand his critical perspective on modern morality and political life, we need to grasp Oakeshott's thought at its deepest and most difficult levels, where it addresses the very nature of knowledge and the character of human conduct. Our task is made no easier by the fact that, whereas Oakeshott's thought issues in a darkly skeptical conservatism, it springs from a conception of knowledge and its relations with practical life that (although perhaps owing something to Hegel) is radically at odds with longstanding traditions in Western philosophy.
Oakeshott himself, a most recent personality, has not sought publicity for his views. Born in 1901 and elected to a Fellowship at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, in 1923, Oakeshott has always been a reclusive figure, but has exerted--particularly during his years as a professor of political science at the London School of Economics--a profound and subtle influence on political philosophy in our time. Not all of his books are addressed to questions of philosophy--for example, he published in the thirties A Guide to the Classic, which is a survey of the main horse races in Britain--but he is widely regarded as the leading twentieth-century British conservative philosopher.
There is in Oakeshott's conservative thought, in addition, the paradox that, despite his criticism of modern decadence, Oakshott is in no sense an antimodernist: If anything, he is an uncompromising modernist, perhaps even a postmodernist. How are these obscurities in his work to be clarified?
The Pursuit of Knowledge
We may set out on the path to understanding Oakeshott's thought by considering his first major statement of it in his book Experience and Its Modes (1933). The book's theme, which has remained with Oakshoot over a long and productive intellectual life, is that human experience cannot be understood or theorized in the terms of any single category of thought. This is to say, first and foremost, that the attempt of the positivist, and of their predecessors in the French Enlightenment, to grasp all human thought and practice in terms of science is doomed to failure. For Oakeshott science is only one idiom of understanding among many. It is no sense at the apex of a hierarchy of modes of thought in which ethics, religion and poetry, say, stand at lower levels. (At times in Experience and Its Modes Oakeshott seems to suggest that philosophy is the highest mode of human understanding, though this is a view he appears later to have abandoned.) Experience discloses itself to us not as a hierarchy but as a miscellany, in which a plurality of distinct modes of thought and practice may be discerned. Accordingly, the idea of a single sort of discourse being "true" or "rational" discourse, which is also the idea that all human knowledge can be organized into a single system, is stigmatized by Oakeshott as a confusion of categories.
This early argument of Oakeshott's goes against much in Western philosophy, at least since Descartes. But it is also a polemic against the scientism that during the thirties, both in Oakeshott's own Cambridge and elsewhere, sought to refashion all thought and action on a model supposedly
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