On History and Other Essays

...It is obvious that many of the works a librarian would put on the history shelf are really political arguments, exercises in nostalgia, or perhaps the creation of elevated intellectual pedigrees for contemporary intellectual trends...

...The big difference was that, whereas Burke was a man of faith, Oakeshott was one of doubt...

...Meanwhile during these later years, he had been rethinking many of the questions dealt with in his earlier writings...

...The kind of association we enjoy-Oakeshott had earlier used the more familiar term "individualist"-is treated by him as an intellectual problem to be understood, not as a practical problem to be solved...

...The essay ends with the satirical tale of a modern Duke Nimrod who inveigled his gullible subjects into one of those giant collective projects in which all the resources of the nation, human and material, were to be mobilized for a seductive end...

...Hobbes was evidently fascinated by the many puzzling features of the form of government emerging in his time, and he attempted to construct the essentials of this state out of the most parsimonious materials: merely human beings, construed as if they were complex machines, with appetites and aversions, Hobbes dispensed with natural sociability, superiorities by nature, subjection to God, inner moral senses, and all the other familiar bits of apparatus which philosophers sometimes employed to make their problem easier of solution...

...Above all, the historical past must be distinguished from the living "past," which he thinks is hardly past at all: It is the present contents of a vast storehouse into which time continuously - empties the lives, the utterances, the achievements and the sufferings of mankind...

...Here too there is the occasional reference to unspecified "moral idiocies," but this is an Oakeshott who has taken on board,whatever criticism or bafflement he has earlier induced in his readers, and attempts to deal with it...

...His aim here is to elicit and distinguish a specific mode of association between individual human beings which is purely one of subscription to a set of laws...

...They do not all speak the same language, nor is there any common good which they all pursue...

...History had featured, in Experience and its Modes, as an "arrest" of human thought in a certain mode of abstraction, having its own presuppositions and a limited coherence...

...Oakeshott seeks to elicit what is involved in this mode of association, which he insists, toward the end of the essay, is altogether too abstract to constitute, by itself, an account of even a possible, much less an actual, modern state...

...nor even a common patriotism...

...This skeptical side of his thought has always cut across'the political enthusiasms of the modern world...

...BOOK REVIEWSON HISTORY AND OTHER ESSAYS Michael Oakeshott / Barnes & Noble Books / $25.75 Kenneth Minogue Michael Oakeshott's new collection of essays comes out fifty years after his first work, Experience and its Modes...

...In a later essay, he had argued for history as a pure involvement with constructing past events, completely disengaged from the excitements of contemporary commitment...

...It exhibits nothing of that practical nostalgia for some true community just around the philosophical corner such as has often passionately attracted most political thinkers since Rousseau, including the early Hegel, to whom Oakeshott is in some respects much indebted...

...From Nimrod in the Old Testament to Pol Pot in modern Cambodia, history has yielded a long succession of titans seeking (as Oakeshott put it in that earlier essay) "perfection as the crow flies...

...As a Cambridge don back in the 1930s, he seemed to some an elegant echo of the British idealists...

...Oakeshott has this same disposition, and his pertinent comments on Hobbes may be seen in the collection of his writings called Hobbes on Civil Association...

...But the city's "obsession with the bottomless abundance of paradise" destroyed them all and, much later, after the ruins of that enterprise had long been overgrown with purple asphodel and become but objects of archaeological interest, a poetic fragment was discovered, composed by an early Babelian poet, which was deciphered as: Those who in fields Elysian would dwell Do but extend the boundaries of hell...

...But one may say that the rule of law must be distinguished from such other forms of human association as partnership, competition, and gaming...

...The essay is also typical by virtue of a density of thought which makes the style not, indeed, obscure, but certainly clotted, and lacking the seductive ease of the earlier writings...

...Oakeshott's own full-length treatment of this subject was On Human Conduct (1975...

...Finally, an intellectual bonbon ' called "The Tower of Babel," an essay and a story not to be confused with one of the same title published in Rationalism in Politics...

...In this phase of his thought, he was widely regarded as a conservative political philosopher, an expression Oakeshott himself would regard as incoherent...

...In 1951, he was appointed to the chair of political science at the London School of Economics which had previously been held by the well-known socialist Harold Laski, and his inaugural lecture skeptically repudiating the idea that the activity of politics could be built upon firm scientific or philosophical foundations was a famous caesura in the development of the subject...

...It must constitute an account of human life in which everything is circumstantially changing over time...

...In these new essays, his problem begins from the fact that actual books of history are remarkably miscellaneous bodies of thought, incorporating factual statements, moral judgments, bits of generalization, verdicts, and much else...

...What is it, one might ask, which all citizens of the United States have in common...

...Much of what he then had to say about political activity (some of it published in Rationalism in Politics, 1962) had evident affinities with Burke's criticism of the French revolutionaries...

...Such change cannot be teleological, or law-governed, or miraculous, not because the historian denies the possibility of such types of change, but because Oakeshott's problem is to isolate a genuinely historical understanding from the covertly causal and scientific manners of speaking which are often employed in the expositions of actual historians...

...But it was a period of dreadful tedium in political thought, and Oakeshott soon commanded attention as a highly distinctive thinker deeply engaged in the philosophical understanding of modernity as a special type of response to the human condition...

...Any concern with bread and butter academic controversy, however, is usually implicit...

...Such things would seem at least to include the sort of law which Herbert Hart has discussed as performing the function of enabling people to do things otherwise impossible-such as make contracts, wills, or marriages...

...Oakeshott does in fact think this possible, and the three essays in history here presented record the process of analysis by which a past clearly distinguished from the mere use of the past tense begins to emerge...

...Among the central preoccupations of Oake-shott's argument is a rejection of the contemporary propensity to confuse the authenticity of a law with its desirability-that impatient lust for imagined goods which makes our contemporaries intolerant of any forms and procedures which frustrate their immediate desires...

...After 1945, when he was editing the Cambridge Journal, he wrote an influential set of essays criticizing an almost ubiquitous intellectual tendency which he called "rationalism," and which could be discerned in the attempt of social-democratic regimes (such as the Attlee government in Britain) to determine human happiness by legislative fiat and bureaucratic regulation...

...The common academic manner of writing takes off from problems left behind by earlier thinkers and, signposting these coordinates abundantly, leaves in its wake further trailing problems to which others can attach themselves, rather like those strings of chemical entities which are the clue to life...

...Nothing can emerge from this particular sort of inquiry except a passage of human experience understood, in terms of its circumstances, as a special kind of event...

...On History and Other Essays is the fruit of this later thought...

...A plausible answer is to see them as constituting an association merely because they are all subject to the laws of the United States, and many of their practices (especially in relation to the courts and due process) would support this view...

...Oakeshott by contrast takes a problem and attempts to think it right through in terms of the scale within which he is working, a procedure which makes it difficult to discover a point of critical entry and conveys to some more conventional philosophical readers the impression that there is no argument at all...

...Can one discover, amid this miscellany, a definable o concern with the past whose point is purely to understand what the surviving records reveal about that past...

...A recognition of such an overweening pride, individual and collective, of the common refusal to accept the terms of the human condition, has provoked many stories and legends in the cultures of the world, and the first part of the essay is a discussion of the character of such stories...

...Not beliefs, certainly...

...As they pour in, these items undergo a process of detachment, shrinkage and desiccation which the less interesting of them withstand...

...The details of the mode of association which Oakeshott calls the rule of law are much too complex for simple summary...

...Oakeshott is very clear that many sorts of rule, and many of the things currently recognized as laws, are explicitly instruments for the attainment of some common end...

...He has always had a special affinity for Hobbes, because of a shared concern about the character of a modern state, and also what one might call a shared sense of the rules of the philosophical game...

...During the 1960s and 1970s, papers were given (and perpetually changed and modified) each year at a graduate seminar at L.S.E...

...This miscellaneous character is perhaps inevitable as a matter of practice, but the philosopher remains interested in trying to discover a specifiable type of understanding which is, as it were, pure history...

...It is an association of personae (abstractions, not concrete human beings) who choose whatever acts they wish to do, but in doing whatever they do, recognize an obligation to subscribe to certain "adverbial conditions" which are contained in the "non-instrumental rules" which constitute the law...

...The essay is typical late Oakeshott...

...What he excludes from the rule of law is clearer than what he includes, and this particular reader would have been grateful for some further discussion of the idea of a "non-instrumental rule...

...Here are Cain and Abel, Moses, Horatius, Caesar crossing the Rubicon, Athanasius at Nicea, Canute on the seashore, King Arthur, Wilhelm Tell, Luther at Worms, Nelson putting the telescope to his blind eye at Copenhagen . . . History is thus specified as a form of understanding which arises only when questions about those things around us which are recognized for this purpose as survivals from an earlier time are examined, and subjected to a sequence of questions of a particular kind...

...The positive side is less easy to grasp, even though Oakeshott's intellectual life has exhibited a remarkable vocation to think, and rethink, and then to think through again, the conceptual questions that arise when we try to understand politics in philosophical terms...

...Like Hobbes, Oakeshott began far out: by considering the distinctive nature of human moral agency...

...The same technique of burrowing into a practice in order to elicit a pattern of postulates which together compose an ideal activity or relationship is found in the long essay in which Oakeshott attempts to define what can be meant by the idea called "the rule of law...

...Those earlier writings were occasionally marked by sudden polemics, the intrusion into a highly abstract argument of some term of intellectual contempt, illuminating the academic terrain like summer lightning...