Michael Oakeshott | |
|---|---|
 Oakeshott in the 1960s | |
| Born | Michael Joseph Oakeshott (1901-12-11)11 December 1901 Chelsfield,London, England |
| Died | 19 December 1990(1990-12-19) (aged 89) Acton, England |
| Education | |
| Alma mater | Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge |
| Philosophical work | |
| Era | 20th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | |
| Main interests | |
| Notable ideas | Adverbial conditions |
Michael Joseph Oakeshott[a] (11 December 1901 – 19 December 1990) was an English philosopher. He is known for his contributions to thephilosophies ofhistory,religion,aesthetics,education, andlaw.[3]
Oakeshott was born inChelsfield, London, on 11 December 1901, the son ofJoseph Francis Oakeshott, acivil servant with theInland Revenue,[4] and member of theFabian Society,[5] and Frances Maude, daughter of George Thistle Hellicar, a well-offIslington silk-merchant.[4] His sister Violet marriedeconomist andsocial reformerGilbert Slater.[6] His uncle Harold's first wife waswomen's rightsactivistGrace Oakeshott,[7] though there is no evidence that Michael knew her.[citation needed] He attendedSt George's School, Harpenden, a new co-educational and 'progressive' boarding school from 1912 to 1920. He enjoyed his schooldays, and the Headmaster, the Rev. Cecil Grant, a disciple ofMaria Montessori, later became a friend.[citation needed]
In 1920, Oakeshott matriculated with a Scholarship atGonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he read history, taking the Political Science options in both parts of theTripos, theUniversity of Cambridge's degree examinations. He graduated in 1923 with a first-class degree, subsequently promoted toMA (Cantab), and was elected a Fellow of Caius in 1925.
As a University of Cambridge student, he admired theBritish idealist philosophersJ. M. E. McTaggart andJohn Grote, and the medieval historianZachary Nugent Brooke. He said that McTaggart's introductory lectures were the only formal philosophical training he ever received. ThehistorianHerbert Butterfield was a contemporary, friend and fellow member of the Junior Historians society.[citation needed]
After graduation in 1923, Oakeshott pursuedtheology andGerman literature in a summer course at the universities ofMarburg andTübingen, and again in 1925. In between, he taught literature for a year as Senior English Master atKing Edward VII Grammar School, Lytham, while simultaneously writing his fellowship dissertation, which he said was a 'dry run' for his first book,Experience and its Modes.
Oakeshott was dismayed by thepolitical extremism that occurred in Europe during the 1930s, and his surviving lectures from this period reveal a dislike ofNazism andMarxism.[8] He is said to have been the first at Cambridge to lecture onMarx. At the suggestion ofSir Ernest Barker, who sought to see Oakeshott succeed to his own chair of political science at theUniversity of Cambridge, he produced an anthology, with commentary,The Social and Political Doctrines of Contemporary Europe, published in 1939. For all its muddle and incoherence, as Oakeshott saw it, he foundrepresentative democracy the least unsatisfactory, in part because "the imposition of a universal plan of life on a society is at once stupid and immoral."
Oakeshott joined theBritish Army in 1940, before beingconscripted under theNational Service Act. He volunteered for the virtually suicidalSpecial Operations Executive (SOE), where the average life expectancy was about six weeks, and was interviewed byHugh Trevor-Roper, who felt that he was "too unmistakably English" to conduct covert operations on the Continent.[9]
Oakeshott saw active service in Europe with the battlefield intelligence unitPhantom, a semi-freelance quasi-Signals organisation which also had connections with theSpecial Air Service (SAS). Though always at the front, the unit was seldom directly involved in any actual fighting. Oakeshott's military competence did not go unnoticed, and he ended the war as Adjutant of Phantom's 'B' Squadron and an actingmajor.
In 1945, Oakeshott was demobilised and returned to theUniversity of Cambridge. In 1949, he left Cambridge forNuffield College, Oxford, but after only two years, in 1951, he was appointed Professor of Political Science at theLondon School of Economics (LSE), succeeding the leftistHarold Laski, an appointment noted by the popular press. Oakeshott was deeply unsympathetic to the student activism at LSEduring the late 1960s, and highly critical of what he saw as the authorities' insufficiently robust response. He retired from the LSE in 1969, but continued teaching and conducting seminars until 1980.
In his retirement, he retreated to live quietly in a country cottage inLangton Matravers inDorset with his third wife. He was twice divorced and had numerous affairs, many of them with wives of his students, colleagues and friends, and even with his son Simon's girlfriend.[10] He also had a son out of wedlock, whom he abandoned together with the mother when the child was two, and whom he did not meet again for nearly twenty years. Oakeshott's most famous lover wasIris Murdoch.[11]
Oakeshott lived long enough to experience increasing recognition, although he has become much more widely written about since his death. Oakeshott declined an offer to be made aCompanion of Honour, for which he was proposed byMargaret Thatcher.[12]
Oakeshott's early work, some of which has been published posthumously asWhat is History? and Other Essays (2004) andThe Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence (2007), shows that he was more interested in the philosophical problems that derived from his historical studies than he was in the history, even though he was officially a historian. Some of his very early essays are on religion (of a Christian 'modernist' kind), though after his first marital break-up (c. 1934) he published no more on the topic except for a couple of pages in hismagnum opus, titledOn Human Conduct. However, his posthumously published and voluminousNotebooks (1919-) show a lifelong preoccupation with religion and questions of mortality. In his youth he had considered taking Holy Orders, but later inclined towards a non-specific Romanticmysticism.
Oakeshott published his first book in 1933,Experience and its Modes, when he was thirty-one. He acknowledged the influence ofGeorg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel andF. H. Bradley;[13] commentators also noticed resemblances between this work and the ideas of thinkers such asR. G. Collingwood[14] andGeorg Simmel.[15]
The book argued that our experience is usually modal, in the sense that we almost always have a governing perspective on the world, be it practical or theoretical. One may take varioustheoretical approaches to the world:natural science, history and practice, for example, are quite separate, immiscible modes of experience. It is a mistake, he declared, to treat history on the model of the sciences, or to read into it one's current practical concerns.
Philosophy, however, is not a mode. At this stage of his career Oakeshott understood philosophy as the world seen, in Spinoza's phrase,sub specie aeternitatis, literally "under the aspect ofeternity", free from presuppositions, whereas science and history and the practical mode rely on certain assumptions. Later (there is disagreement about exactly when) Oakeshott adopted a pluralistic view of the various modes of experience, with philosophy just one voice among others, though it retained its self-critical character.
According to Oakeshott, the dominating principles of scientific and historical thought are quantity (the worldsub specie quantitatis) and pastness (the worldsub specie praeteritorum) respectively. Oakeshott distinguished the academic perspective on the past from the practical, in which the past is seen in terms of its relevance to our present and future. His insistence on theautonomy of history places him close toCollingwood, who also argued for the autonomy of historical knowledge.
The practical world view (the worldsub specie voluntatis) presupposes the ideas of will and value. It is only in terms of these that practical action, for example in politics, economics, andethics, makes sense. Because all action is conditioned by presuppositions, Oakeshott saw any attempt to change the world as reliant upon a scale of values, which themselves presuppose a context in whichthis is preferable tothat. Even the conservative disposition to maintain thestatus quo (so long as the latter is tolerable) relies upon managing inevitable change, a point he later elaborated in his essay "On Being Conservative".
During this period, Oakeshott published what became his best known work during his lifetime, the collection entitledRationalism in Politics and Other Essays (1962), and notable for its elegance of style. Some of his near-polemics against the direction that Britain was taking, in particular towardssocialism, gained Oakeshott a reputation as a traditionalist conservative, sceptical aboutrationalism and rigidideologies.Bernard Crick described him as a "lonelynihilist".[16]
Oakeshott's opposition to politicalutopianism is summed up in hisanalogy (possibly borrowed from a pamphlet by the 17th-century statesmanGeorge Savile, 1st Marquess of Halifax,The Character of a Trimmer) of a ship of state that has "neither starting-place nor appointed destination...[and where] the enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel".[17] He was a severe critic ofE. H. Carr, the Cambridge historian ofSoviet Russia, claiming that Carr was fatally uncritical of theBolshevik regime and took some of itspropaganda at face value.[18]
In his essay "On BeingConservative" (1956)[19] Oakeshott characterised conservatism as a disposition rather than a political stance: "To be conservative ... is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss."
Oakeshott'spolitical philosophy, as advanced inOn Human Conduct (1975), is free of any recognisableparty politics. The book's first part ("On the Theoretical Understanding of Human Conduct") develops atheory of human action as the exercise of intelligentagency in activities such as wanting and choosing, the second ("On the Civil Condition") discusses the formal conditions of association appropriate to such intelligent agents, described as "civil" or legal association, and the third ("On the Character of a Modern European State") examines how far this understanding of human association has affected politics and political ideas in post-RenaissanceEuropean history.
Oakeshott suggests that there had been two major modes or understandings of political organization. In the first, which he calls "enterprise association" (oruniversitas), the state is (illegitimately) understood as imposing some universal purpose (profit,salvation, progress, racial domination) on its subjects. (As its name indicates, enterprise association is perfectly appropriate to the management ofenterprises; however, except in emergencies such as war, where all resources must be commandeered into the pursuit of victory, the state is not an enterprise, properly so called.) By contrast, "civil association" (orsocietas) is primarily a legal relationship in which laws impose obligatory conditions of action but do not require the associates to choose one action rather than another. (CompareRobert Nozick on 'side-constraints'.)
The complex, technical and often rebarbative style ofOn Human Conduct found few readers, and its initial reception was mostly one of bafflement. Oakeshott, who rarely responded to critics, replied sardonically inPolitical Theory to some of the contributions made in a symposium on the book in the same journal.[20]
In his posthumously publishedThe Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism Oakeshott describes enterprise associations and civil associations in different terms. In politics, an enterprise association is based on a fundamental faith in human ability to ascertain and grasp some universal good (leading to the Politics of Faith), and civil association is based on a fundamental scepticism about human ability to either ascertain or achieve this good (leading to the Politics of Scepticism). Oakeshott considers power (especially technological power) as a necessary prerequisite for the Politics of Faith, because it allows people to believe that they can achieve something great and to implement the policies necessary to achieve their goal. The Politics of Scepticism, on the other hand, rests on the idea that government should concern itself with preventing bad things from happening, rather than enabling ambiguously good events. Oakeshott was presumably dissatisfied with this book, which, like much of what he wrote, he never published. It was evidently written well beforeOn Human Conduct.
In the latter book Oakeshott employs the analogy of theadverb to describe the kind of restraint that law involves. Laws prescribe "adverbial conditions": they condition our actions, but they do not determine their substantive chosen ends. For example, the law against murder is not a law against killing as such, but only a law against killing "murderously". Or, to choose a more trivial example, the law does not dictate that I have a car, but if I do, I must drive it on the same side of the road as everybody else. This contrasts with the rules of enterprise associations, in which the actions required by the management are made compulsory for all.
In the final work that Oakeshott published in his lifetime,On History (1983), he returned to the idea that history is a distinct mode of experience, but this time building on the theory of action developed inOn Human Conduct. Much ofOn History had emerged from Oakeshott's post-retirement graduate seminars at LSE, and had been written at the same time asOn Human Conduct, in the early 1970s.
During the mid-1960s Oakeshott declared an admiration forWilhelm Dilthey, one of the pioneers ofhermeneutics.On History can be interpreted as an essentiallyneo-Kantian enterprise of working out the conditions of the possibility of historical knowledge, work that Dilthey had begun.
The first three essays set out the distinction between the present of historical experience and the present of practical experience, as well as the concepts of historical situation, historical event, and what is meant by change in history.On History includes an essay onjurisprudence ("The Rule of Law"). It also includes a retelling ofThe Tower of Babel in a modern setting[21] in which Oakeshott expresses disdain for human willingness to sacrifice individuality, culture, and quality of life for grand collective projects. He attributes this behaviour to fascination with novelty, persistent dissatisfaction, greed, and lack of self-reflection.[22]
Oakeshott's other works included a reader, already mentioned, onThe Social and Political Doctrines of Contemporary Europe. It consisted of selected texts illustrating the main doctrines ofliberalism,national socialism,fascism,communism, andRoman Catholicism (1939). He editedThomas Hobbes'sLeviathan (1946), with an introduction that has been recognised as a significant contribution to the literature by some later scholars. Several of Oakeshott's writings on Hobbes were collected and published in 1975 asHobbes on Civil Association.
With his Cambridge colleagueGuy Thompson Griffith, Oakeshott wroteA Guide to the Classics, or How to Pick The Derby Winner (1936), a guide to the principles of successful betting onhorse racing. This was his only published non-academic work.
Oakeshott was the author of well over 150 essays and reviews, most of which have now been republished.
Just before he died Oakeshott approved two edited collections of his works,The Voice of Liberal Learning (1989), a collection of his essays on education, and a second, revised and expanded edition ofRationalism in Politics (1991). Posthumous collections of his writings includeMorality and Politics in Modern Europe (1993), a lecture series he gave atHarvard in 1958;Religion, Politics, and the Moral Life (1993), essays mostly from his early and middle periods; andThe Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism (1996), an already-mentioned manuscript from the 1950s contemporary with much ofRationalism in Politics but written in a more considered tone.
The bulk of his papers are now in the Oakeshott Archive at theLondon School of Economics. Further volumes of posthumous writings are in preparation, as is a biography, and a series of monographs devoted to his work were published during the first decade of the 21st century, and continue to be produced.
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