Michael Oakeshott's Cold War Liberalism

T. Nardin

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137507020
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In this book, leading scholars from East Asia and beyond debate Michael Oakeshott's views on liberal democracy and totalitarianism and their implications for East Asia today. His ideas on rationality in politics, the nature of liberal democracy, and how democracy can defeat anti-liberal politics are explored in ten penetrating essays.

PART I

Oakeshott on Modern Politics: Conservative or Liberal?

CHAPTER 1

Michael Oakeshott: Neither Liberal nor Conservative

Terry Nardin

Why ask whether Oakeshott’s views on modern politics are liberal or conservative? One reason is that Oakeshott contributed to the discussion of public affairs, even if mostly in ways that were relatively detached from immediate issues or personalities. A historian might want to know where he stood in relation to the political debates of his day. And his opinions, along with his failures in detachment, his biases, would interest a biographer. What is less legitimate, in my view, is to ask the question in order to locate him on an ideological spectrum. It is hard to see the point of such an exercise, though one understands the impulse to embrace or repudiate a thinker for political reasons. If we want to understand Oakeshott’s most significant ideas, asking whether he is a liberal or a conservative is like asking how many angels can dance on the head of a pin—the question calls not for earnest inquiry but for a paradigm shift, in the absence of which old and sterile debates are pointlessly repeated.

Oakeshott’s success in making distinctions that are more lucid than those of partisan controversy underlines the futility of categorizing his thought as either liberal or conservative. The point can be illustrated by recalling the allegory of the cave, as Oakeshott himself does at the beginning of On Human Conduct, though for a purpose quite at odds with Plato’s.¹ A prisoner in the cave who sheds his chains, and who for the first time can turn around, learns that what he had supposed to be real are actually shadows. He understands old things in a new way. And when he makes his way into the light of day he can see even more clearly than in the dim light of the cave. Why would such a person want to return to a world of shadows? If he concludes that the chief tension in modern politics is between enterprise and civil association, what is gained by forcing that insight back into the cave categories of left and right, liberal or conservative? To do that would be to insist that the categories of the cave are more fundamental than those that emerge from a philosophical enquiry. When a thinker has with some success unsettled received ideas, to view his contribution through the lens of those same ideas is to deny that contribution.²

Instead of discussing where Oakeshott fits on an ideological spectrum, I will focus on his philosophy and ask how one of his most important ideas, the distinction between civil and enterprise association, illuminates modern political discourse. And I will take up two questions about that distinction that have not been much explored. First, to what extent does his theory of civil association resemble Kant’s theory of right and what can we learn by comparing them? And, second, coming closer to the theme of Cold War attitudes, to what extent does that theory share the outlook of political realism?

Oakeshott as a Philosopher

If Oakeshott is important today, it is as a philosopher, not as a participant in political debates of the twentieth century. Oakeshott’s most important philosophical ideas are those of modality, contingency, and civility.

The first of these, modality, is the idea that human activity and its intellectual products can be understood in relation to kinds of inquiry and understanding that are not only distinct but are not reducible to one another. Each is a self-subsistent world of ideas providing its own criteria of factuality, truth, and reality. What we call true, factual, or real depends not on criteria outside experience but on what is experienced through the modal categories that determine how conclusions are reached. Thinking with respect to acting—“practice”—is one such mode. Thinking with an aim toward explaining what one is experiencing is either “science” or “history” depending on what it seeks to explain: general relations in the case of scientific inquiry and particular events in the case of history. Each mode is a discourse in which only certain kinds of arguments, evidence, and conclusions make sense.

In Experience and Its Modes, Oakeshott presents the modes he identifies as necessarily partial and incomplete, which implies the possibility of less partial and more complete understanding. Much “Idealist” philosophy after Hegel, including for a time Oakeshott’s own, postulates an “absolute” as the necessary if unattainable whole of which different modes of thought are aspects or parts. But the idea of a single and comprehensive supra-modal understanding is undercut by the view, which Oakeshott also defends, that the modes are intellectual achievements that have a history and are subject to change. This gives them a contingent rather than a necessary character and suggests that the prospect of their ultimate reconciliation is an illusion. He later makes this point by treating the modes as “voices” in conversation. In a genuine conversation, the exchange is always playful because the different voices do not seek to silence one another. A conversation is not an argument and is incapable of reaching a conclusion. It is an exchange that preserves rather than eradicates modal differences.

On Human Conduct introduces a new distinction: between the “intelligent” and the “not-intelligent” as basic categories of inquiry and understanding. This distinction parallels the distinction between the human and the natural sciences but formulates it with philosophical precision. What distinguishes inquiries, at this deep level, is not whether their subject matter is human or not-human but rather whether an identified pattern in experience falls in one or the other of these mutually exclusive categories. The pattern will be recognized as the product of thought or design, like an inscription or machine, or as manifesting the occurrence of processes that do not involve thought or design, like a tsunami or lymphatic circulation. One might explain a given event—a cough, for example—as either intelligent or not-intelligent, but the explanations are mutually exclusive and not interchangeable or translatable. They belong to different discourses with distinct conceptual vocabularies, and those who argue across the boundaries that divide them are guilty of “categorial” confusion.³ These categories do not replace the modes but are superimposed upon them, with “history” as the most distinct and coherent of what used to be called the human sciences joining “practice” in the category of intelligence and “science” occupying the category of the “natural” or the not-intelligent. The idea of distinct and mutually exclusive categories grounds a pluralist metaphysics, one that preserves in the sphere of thought a principle of independence that, for Oakeshott, is also important in human interaction. It is a metaphysics of civilization against the barbarism of “one ring to rule them all.”

Oakeshott’s second important philosophical idea—contingency—pertains to the way in which human actions are connected with one another. Because practice and history are concerned with human acts, they are joined in the category of intelligence and distinguished from science, which is concerned with things categorized as the outcome of not-intelligent processes. To explain an incident of human behavior as intelligent conduct we must interpret its meaning. In doing so, we cannot ignore the self-understanding of the person whose conduct we wish to explain. To grasp what people are doing we need to understand the choices they make and their reasons for making them. Furthermore, we must understand their choices as related to the choices of others, for these provide the context that makes them intelligible. A relationship of “contingency,” then, is one that connects thoughts and actions. When we explain what people are doing in terms of contingency, we invoke not causal processes but shared meanings, common practices, and sequences of events in which the meaning of what comes after is understood in relation to the meaning of what came before. Actions that are related contingently illuminate one another in a way that makes a sequence of choices and responses intelligible.

This is how we understand ourselves and other people in everyday life. It is also how historians understand the events they seek to explain. What distinguishes the two is that history, unlike practice, is purely explanatory. History as a mode of inquiry is distinct from making choices—it is not “practical” in the sense of guiding conduct. It is also distinct from “science,” which explains events as the joint outcome of general laws that describe a process, and occurrences or conditions as input into that process. And the reason history is distinct from science is that a historical explanation, unlike a scientific one, must account not for the occurrence of a generic and repeatable event but for the meaning of a particular, unrepeatable one. This meaning can be understood only in relation to the meaning of the antecedent events that combined to produce it. The result is a full-blown theory of history as a mode of understanding that is distinct from other modes.

The third important idea that Oakeshott contributed to philosophy is the idea of civil association. A state is an association governed by law, but only a state in which law is understood as a noninstrumental constraint on conduct rather than an instrument of policy qualifies as a civil association. In what has come to be called “the ambiguity thesis,” Oakeshott argues that actual states in the modern world are modally complex. Each is a mixture of civil and what he calls purposive or enterprise association, a mode of relationship in which people are joined in the pursuit of a religious, economic, or other substantive purpose. In a state understood in this way, law is an instrument for achieving this purpose and government is the manager of the enterprise. Here, government is not, as it would be in a civil association, a custodian or umpire; instead, it exercises authority and wields coercion to motivate compliance with the purpose that defines the association.

In the civil mode, all purposes, whether individual or collective, are pursued within the limits of rules that are not instrumental to achieving them. Such limits are often identified by expressions like “morality,” “natural law,” or “human rights,” but these expressions are equivocal because they have different meanings in the context of civil and enterprise association. Moreover, to be effective in regulating the affairs of an actual state, rules need to be authoritatively interpreted as they are applied in particular situations. By itself, a morality provides no way to resolve disputes over the proper interpretation and application of its principles. The idea of civil association as association on the basis of agreed laws addresses this problem. The state as a legal order provides a procedure for adjudicating interpretive disputes, and in a state that is understood to be a civil association that procedure is concerned with legal rights and duties, not with promoting substantive goals.

Oakeshott treads carefully through these passages of modern political practice and thought, making arguments of his own along the way. Without further exploring those arguments, I will simply underline his point that the civil mode is an abstraction from the contingencies of any actual state. And what it abstracts is those aspects of the relationship between citizens that presuppose general rules of conduct defining the terms of association. Such rules prescribe noninstrumental constraints on the pursuit of purposes—in other words, considerations of “justice” that ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Michael Oakeshott’s Cold War Liberalism
• Part I   Oakeshott on Modern Politics: Conservative or Liberal?
• Part II   Oakeshott on Totalitarianism and Constitutional Democracy
• Part III   Oakeshott in the East Asian Context
• Notes on Contributors
• Index