Oakeshott on rationalism
The philosopher's delicious prose illuminates the struggles of conservatives
One of the most illuminating – and enjoyable – pieces of philosophy I’ve read in recent years is the essay Rationalism in Politics by the British conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott.
I love Oakeshott for a number of reasons, one of which is his grumpiness about the state of conservatism, something he shared with more contemporary conservative thinkers like Roger Scruton and Peter Hitchens. As with both of them, you often encounter a sense of loss and continuing defeat in his writing as in the following passage from On being conservative. A legendary essay among conservatives who think, in it Oakeshott refers to an archetype of the man in whom the ‘conservative disposition’ is ‘strong’,
. . . last seen swimming against the tide, disregarded not because what he has to say is necessarily false but because it has become irrelevant; outmanoeuvred, not on account of any intrinsic demerit but merely by the flow of circumstance; a faded, timid, nostalgic character, provoking pity as an outcast and contempt as a reactionary.
I think it’s worth stating that he first delivered that essay as a lecture in 1956. Not a time normally associated with the march of progressivism, at least in Britain.
Oakeshott was born in 1901 and died in 1990. After working on special duties during World War II, in 1951 he was appointed as Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics, replacing the strongly left-wing Harold Laski. He stood down from the LSE in 1969 having struggled against the student activism of the 1960s, but continued teaching until full retirement in 1980.
‘Rationalism in Politics’ first appeared in the Cambridge Journal in 1947 but Professor Timothy Fuller says its publication with other essays including ‘Political education’ and ‘On being conservative’ in 1962 “was a major event in contemporary political philosophy, accelerating Michael Oakeshott’s advance to the forefront of contemporary political philosophers.”