THE ROOTS OF CONSERVATISM OAKESHOT AND THE DENIAL OF POLITICS
Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel
The seemingly uncontrollable movement of American policy toward domestic repression and imperial warfare makes it of the utmost urgency that we understand what is involved in our "new...
...it never stays fixed...
...Oakeshott says that conservatism is likely to appear in politics wherever the present inheritance is valued but perceived as threatened...
...This possibility was what Aristotle meant in calling man a political animal—a creature that fulfills itself in politics, whose full human development can only take place through participation in polis citizenship...
...1 1 4 1bid., pp...
...Oakeshott's thought, by contrast, moves in a world where fathers have become faceless nonentities...
...For Oakeshott understands that each of us is a product of his society, of history...
...137 Ibid., p. 171...
...52 Ibid., p. 73...
...He attended St...
...99 Ibid., pp...
...12, 99...
...vinced that there is something fundamentally wrong with it...
...Such knowledge "exists only in practice, and the only way to acquire it is by apprenticeship to a master...
...2. 13 Oakeshott, Rationalism, pp...
...ibid., pp...
...31 Ibid., p. 133...
...And though Oakeshott recognizes the inevitability of change, that "a man's identity (or that of a community...
...And so, concerning British rule in India, Burke was able to see that whether the resident British magistrate can serve as a model of liberty or only as a symbol of oppression depends on his actual conduct and the principles it embodies, not on the political traditions of the country from which he comes.79 But the problem forced him to argue on the ground of precisely the kind 78 Ibid., p. 122...
...He is intensely aware that there are real, concrete human lives at stake...
...Consider, for example, a colony of the British Empire, perhaps in Africa or Asia, that is only an artificial administrative unit created without regard for former tribal boundaries...
...183, 189...
...134 Burke, Reflections, p. 87...
...The problem for under 34 Ibid., p. 29...
...And, particularly with men in a hurry, 1'homme a programme with his abridgment wins every time...
...On the one hand, he shares much with our own new conservatives: a fear of conflict and a quest for stability, a preference for minimal politics without participation or passion...
...12 There are also two contrasting "forms," as Oakeshott calls them, "of the moral life": one explicit and didactic, requiring deliberation of systematic ideals, and another based on character and habit, arising directly out of a tradition of behavior...
...The attempt to act Rationalistically, then, succeeds only in destroying coherence—social coherence among individuals, and chronological coherence, the sensed "partnership between present and past...
...48 Burke, Reflections, pp...
...on the contrary, the resulting process of conflict can be used to keep alive an awareness of what is 153 Ibid., passim...
...but the entire sequence of his shorter writings seems to be a series of forays against the persistent problem of Rationalism...
...cit., pp...
...Michael Oakeshott, "The Customer is Never Wrong," Listener, 54 (August 25, 1955): 301-302...
...Though he is This essay is part of a larger work written during free time made available to me by a grant from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, for which I am most grateful...
...The only possible value is a stable voyage: don't rock the boat...
...and, like Albert Camus, he insists that present suf fering must never be lightly justified in the name of some abstract vision of the future...
...THE ROOTS OF CONSERVATISM dence that there might be something in the child's own innermost needs that drives it toward learning, toward growth, and which might be enlisted in the aid of school education...
...he has been called "the most profound and original political thinker that England has produced in the twentieth century...
...xso Ibid., pp...
...Then Oakeshott can either treat them as opposite ends of a continuum, advocating moderation and balance between them, as in his discussion of 502 morality...
...Them as has, gits...
...It does not even allow the possibility that change might also enhance or develop the self, that change is opportunity, that a self without challenges must either invent some or atrophy...
...To be sure, Oakeshott sometimes disparages Burke...
...The appeal to tradition, then, is useful only to the privileged, both in the sense that one must already be blessed with a healthy tradition in order to make such an appeal, and in the sense that only those already granted privileges by that tradition can ex 80 Oakeshott, Rationalism, p. 183...
...And if those are the only alternatives, then indeed both civilization and 143 But note that he explicitly claims that in politics we are adults, not children...
...Colin Falck, "Romanticism in Politics," New Left Review, 18 (January-February 1963): 60-71, at 64...
...Precipitated suddenly into the political arena without relevant experience, habit, or tradition, they must find guidance somewhere, and quickly...
...127 Oakeshott, Rationalism, p. 59...
...As Crick says, Oakeshott always "prefers the connoisseur to the expert...
...And for Oakeshott, although that is a calamity, it is never the fault of the tradition itself...
...it stresses the intricacies of human practice that defy formulation in explicit rules: knowhow, habit, the slow evolution of a civilization, community rather than organization, character rather than technique...
...4 Whether or not one shares the resulting conservative implications for politics, one can find much of value in Oakeshott's vision of what a society is, what a civilization is...
...For Oakeshott's major concern in his later writings is politics, a realm in which the problems of necessity and choice, interpretation and style, become inextricably intertwined...
...called "government...
...1311 Yet there seems to be an incongruity between the latter two conditions: a firm identity does not always experience change as a threat but sometimes as an opportunity...
...113 It is not a question of who will "win," but of mutual participation in a shared development...
...In each case, rationality depends on fidelity to the traditions of the particular kind of human enterprise involved...
...Each participant therefore learns about his own views 111 Ibid., pp...
...And for him, as for Burke, that danger has specific historical embodiment in "uncivilized" social groups seeking admission to the political realm, and particularly in the poor, who carry with them the urgency of physical need...
...And even those who benefit from it cannot support it well, because they have given the matter no thought, have had no practice in deliberation and action...
...I shall use that term for it throughout, though he sometimes gives it different names in other fields...
...144 But though the criticism of Oakeshott is valid, Wood's way of putting it fails to get at the reason for Oakeshott's position...
...For of course it is not true that the poor, and only the poor, are "driven by economic, physical necessity...
...But of such a tribe we shall want to say precisely that it lacks politics...
...He has a living vision of what community means, of what community was—not a uniform totality in which the individual disappears, but a home within which he can develop, whose norms are less his restraints than the means of his freedom...
...and much can be learned about our current domestic variant by examining the tradition in political theory on which it sometimes draws...
...not well known in America, Oakeshott, a professor emeritus of political science at the London School of Economics, is one of the few great living spokesmen of the conservative tradition...
...We have already encountered Oakeshott's view that abstract doctrines and formal institutions cannot successfully be exported to peoples unfamiliar with the tradition of inarticulate practice underlying those abstractions...
...It might well give Oakeshott pause to see how feeble are the alliances that he always takes for granted: between Rationalism and political radicalism or liberalism, between traditionalism and political conservatism...
...Consciousness and activity are circular here, and interact...
...The metaphor of conversation clearly implies that politics is a matter of persuasion rather than coercion, and that it is not enough for the needs of a subject creature to be cared for, that administrative efficiency is not enough to constitute a political relationship...
...What is it about Oakeshott's assumptions that renders him in such a context so incredibly blind...
...What would Oakeshott advise such a nation...
...And take their correlated skeptical realism, their suspicion of easy or technical "solutions...
...As a style of conduct, however, it cannot be logically defeated...
...As in technical knowledge and vocational training, so in politics: the Rationalist perspective is one of efficient means toward goals which themselves are not examined— the perspective of applied engineering...
...And that means that in those times and places they are lifted 523 out of unplanned drift and placed on the political agenda as conscious, collective concerns...
...It may even be a complete and accurate account of the collective, public life of certain societies—say, a relatively isolated tribal group with a simple technology living under highly stable conditions...
...Growth is a threat to the old self...
...For the need of the poor "was violent and, as it were, prepolitical...
...ing only the life process, was permitted to enter...
...58 Ibid., p. 114...
...Edmund Burke, "Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs," in Peter J. Stanlis, ed., Edmund Burke: Selected Writings and Speeches (Garden City: Doubleday, 1963), p. 522...
...42 One of the weaknesses of Rationalism is its foolish "disposition to believe that political machinery can take the place of moral and political education," that one can construct artificial institutions to turn private vices into public virtues and thereby avoid the need to change character...
...Yet people may —and many do—believe in the truth of this false, impossible doctrine, and act on it...
...The proper starting place" is "not in the empyrean, but with ourselves as we have come to be...
...We can, of course, make changes, but those changes will be part of the continuity...
...Then philosophy must seem irrelevant to politics...
...151 It is not, then, that Oakeshott is naively unaware of problems of conflict or power...
...Conversation presupposes a shared language and a shared recognition of something worth talking about, as well as a willingness to talk rather than fight...
...But it is this dichotomy that must be called into question if we are to understand what is missing from Oakeshott's account...
...In short, the conservative does not oppose all change...
...Ibid., pp...
...90 The prime modern danger is Socialist Collectivism, a concentration of power and a threat to freedom far greater than those constituted by any private economic abuse...
...it is in fact the spirit of a newly developing capitalism that threatens the autonomy of political life and liberty...
...Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1955), p. 108...
...140 Oakeshott has no confi 138 Ibid., pp...
...Issues like religion, or prices, or race are not by nature, a priori, either political or nonpolitical...
...On the other hand, he would surely be appalled to see a "conservatism" like ours: devoid of all tradition, contemptuous of the society's history, using its traditions of constitutional liberty only as propaganda slogans while readily sacrificing them in the name of law and order...
...25 And abstract political ideology, far from being the quasi-divine parent of political activity, . . . turns out to be its earthly stepchild...
...Customer is Never Wrong," p. 301...
...George's School, Harpenden, and then Gonville and Caius College at Cambridge where he read history, graduating in 1923...
...It is a matter of feeling...
...Oakeshott, "Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence," p. 691...
...What they want to protect against the shopkeeper's or "household" spirit is the possibility of human transcendence, what Tocqueville called "great politics," Machiavelli "glory," and the Greeks immortality...
...Tradition breaks down when people stop following it...
...that is the "pursuit of intimations...
...Oakeshott sympathizes with the suffering of the poor but fears their intervention in politics...
...never because, although they follow it faithfully, it fails to work...
...Oakeshott agrees with Burke that the "abstract perfection" of such formal freedom is its "practical de fect...
...We will not be surprised, then, if the idyllic conditions of healthy habit that Oakeshott envisages are politically rare...
...in Preston King and B. C. Parekh, eds., Politics and Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), p. 249...
...our moral ideals are derived from prior moral practice...
...183, 23...
...That is surely part of what Oakeshott means when he calls the conception of a "self-made" man or a "self-made" society "idolatry...
...nor does the introduction of lowly economic issues into the political realm destroy it...
...112 And more is learned in the course of the conversation than any statement of the "conclusion" reached could possibly convey to one who was not present...
...Arendt seems more contradictory...
...510 HANNA FENICHEL PITKIN shott, the new ruler may find in Machiavelli's Prince a convenient set of maxims to guide his actions.83 Similarly, a new nation, having no political traditions, may seek Rationalistic instruction from any available ideologist...
...the guidance does not come as explicit general principles, but as implications, hints, fragments...
...The decisive philosophical victory is then no longer available...
...Take, for example, the shared suspicion of narrowly utilitarian motives in politics, the fear that political life may be destroyed by the intrusion of a merely contractual spirit...
...In this regard, Oakeshott's views are remarkably similar to those of Hannah Arendt, and of a whole tradition in political theory on which she draws, from Aristotle through Tocqueville, which fears that politics may well be destroyed through the intrusion of the poor...
...The result is "chaos modified by whatever consistency is allowed to creep into caprice...
...it cannot be achieved without risk...
...47 Oakeshott believes, as Burke did, that tradition is essential to freedom because it is the source of "all the pleasing illusions which make power gentle and obedience liberal...
...THE ROOTS OF CONSERVATISM standing Oakeshott's political theory then becomes: what is this style of conduct like and what actual harm does it do...
...116 Oakeshott, Rationalism, p. 4. 516 HANNA FENICHEL PITKIN from day to day and is never complete or unqualified...
...41 That is why the attempt to export English freedoms to countries that have no related tradition of practice, by introducing the formal structure of some English law or institution, is bound to fail...
...Note, however, that Oakeshott is here talking not about a particular style of politics but about an interpretation of all political activity...
...The world is the best of all possible worlds, and everything in it is a necessary evil.' " 33 Now one certainly can regard human affairs from such a perspective that genuine change seems impossible...
...120 He emphatically does not mean that politics should be the locus of courage in action, let alone heroism or the pursuit of glory...
...be suspicious of it...
...32 But his answer to the question is negative...
...I In his later writings, the best of which are collected in Rationalism in Politics, Oakeshott articulates a conception of human society that might best be labeled "ecological...
...Real freedom never inheres in the formality of constitutional provisions or officially proclaimed ideology or institutional structures...
...As Arendt herself sees, the "fateful automatism" of physical necessity, of the "biological process," will "assert itself" more forcefully "the less we are doing ourselves, the less active we are...
...109 Arendt, Human Condition, p. 42...
...149 Thus political education, in particular, requires "knowledge, as profound as we can make it, of our tradition of political behaviour" a knowledge specific and concrete, "municipal, not universal...
...Perhaps we can begin to approach the problem by taking a closer look 64 Ibid., pp...
...Hence what is taught in school "must be capable of being learned without any previous recognition of ignorance," and "at school we are, quite properly, not permitted to follow our own inclinations...
...the traditions have conflicting implications, and none offers that natural harmony for which Oakeshott strives...
...A rebellious thought is as wicked as the deed...
...Though he will not have politics conducted in a narrowly utilitarian spirit, he does not share the traditional alternative, and will not have it conducted in the heroic spirit either...
...but at the same time, our perceptions are shaped by our activity...
...107 What stirred there was a real political life, not because it was free of economic need, but because it combined the demand for bread with the demand for dignity, because it transformed economic need into a question of justice...
...But for the real cause, or the appropriate remedy, they ought never to be called into council...
...This orientation values tradition, prescription, continuity...
...in relation to it, human action disappears...
...In all the theorists of this tradition other than Oakeshott these elements are bound together by an understanding of politics as the potential locus of human greatness...
...44 Clearly, Oakeshott here sees freedom as Hobbes did, as the absence of "external restraints," a not being constrained by coercive power...
...102 But pity is not an insurmountable, physical, causal necessity...
...It is not merely that these idyllic conditions are an ideal of perfection that we may not be able to attain, but toward which we may strive...
...Thus Oakeshott is, in the last analysis, one of those political theorists, like Plato, who are so deeply concerned about the dangers of power, interest, conflict, that they develop a theory in which those problems are eliminated rather than solved, a theory essentially unpolitical...
...e One of these two approaches is always some version of what in politics Oakeshott calls "Rationalism...
...The sort of objections usually raised by Oakeshott's critics are: that he fails to realize that within any given society there can be many, sometimes conflicting traditions...
...Accordingly, Oakeshott maintains that British traditions of liberty and the rule THE ROOTS OF CONSERVATISM of law cannot be successfully exported to uncivilized tribes in the form of ideology or legal formula...
...for the accumulation of more wealth...
...He sees only chaos in the tradition, and feels that "this is no way for rational human beings to be spending their lives...
...But with the intrusion of the masses into political action that began with the French Revolution, the problem of modernity became: can political participation and its attendant values of freedom and responsibility be extended to include all the members of a society, or must the intrusion of the masses, with their inappropriate orientations, necessarily destroy genuine political life...
...is not a fortress into which we may retire," but must be expressed in continual activity, still that activity is conceived as defensive, to protect the endangered self "against the hostile forces of change...
...The reason that only tradition is capable of establishing and protecting freedom is that, secondly, only tradition is an effective restraint on power, and the restraint of power is what freedom is all about...
...Though as anxious to protect it against the utilitarian spirit as any of the theorists in this tradition, he does not value 110 Oakeshott, Rationalism, p. 243...
...According to the Rationalistic view, being rational means pursuing, in an efficient and logical way, a goal which has been selfconsciously and "independently premeditated," which has not been accepted passively from any traditional source.° In this 7 Oakeshott is sometimes misunderstood in this regard, as he anticipated he might be: "Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence," Politica, 3 (September 1938): 203-222, and (December 1938): 345-360, at 349...
...This treatment of education is also paralleled by Oakeshott's more specific views onthe nature of a university, but there is no room to discuss them here...
...ibid., p. 304...
...The Englishman's freedom is a coherence of mutually supporting liberties, each of which amplifies the whole and none 40 Burke, Reflections, p. 68...
...Neither poverty nor urgent need disqualifies people from free political participation...
...or else, as the ongoing, largely unarticulated activity of scientists, rooted in what Polanyi calls "personal knowledge...
...But Oakeshott, though his metaphor of conversation implies that self-development is an essential ingredient of politics, is not really willing to accept that implication...
...Michael Oakeshott was born on December 11, 1901...
...sa Joseph Tussman, Obligation and the Body Politic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), p. 78...
...Even in the concentration camp, some shared their tiny ration of bread...
...ibid., p. 8n...
...succeed...
...But Oakeshott, although he does at one point mock "those who have lost their nerve," and characterizes his vision of politics as "nur fur die Schwindelfreien," reien," never intends more than intellectual courage—the courage to 119 Michael Oakeshott, "The Claims of Politics," Scrutiny 8 (September 1939): 146-151, at 147...
...it is not a "human right" to be deduced from some speculative concept of human nature...
...but "the major part of mankind has nothing to say...
...it will proceed by 14 Ibid., p. 11...
...It springs neither from the separation of church and state, nor from the rule of law, nor from private property, nor from parliamentary government, nor from the writ of habeas corpus, nor from the independence of the judiciary, nor from any one of the thousand other devices and arrangements characteristic of our society, but from what each signifies and represents, namely, the absence from our society of overwhelming concentrations of power...
...if criticized, the criticism must be not logical or ontological but practical...
...What Oakeshott never takes seriously as a possibility is that civilization might not necessarily rest on illusions, but partly on the fulfillment of genuine human needs, so that it would be safe and even desirable to challenge those particular beliefs and institutions that are—in a given historical setting —illusions...
...But though Oakeshott clearly values sta 36 Ibid., p. 124...
...since, conceived that way, the choice can yield no real gratification, can be only duty and never pleasure...
...there is neither starting-place nor appointed destination...
...The details of the argument—and, in particular, its resolution—vary from case to case...
...And Arendt, though she cannot hope as Tocqueville did, since the institutions of political participation that he saw have largely disappeared into a vast bureaucracy, nevertheless does hope, insisting on our capacity even now to change, to choose, to act...
...Not that 117 Oakeshott, "Scientific Politics," p. 347...
...140 Ibid., p. 306...
...100 This is a distressing doctrine, for on the one hand it means that the great values offered by political life are by their nature confined to a wealthy elite, so that the great majority of mankind is condemned to exclusion from self-government and full human development...
...Michael Oakeshott, The Social and Political Doctrines of Contemporary Europe (NewYork: Macmillan, 1942), p. xii, where "regretting our civilization" is identified as a "fruitless, if heroic, act...
...Various critics have charged that such a position is fatal to creativity and progress...
...But, as he points out, no general theoretical principle can provide specific, concrete guidance for particular decisions...
...87 Tradition itself never fails...
...80 O O III akeshott's alternative to these disasters, his vision of a healthy political life, is attractive in many ways, particularly when he leads us toward it by way of his understanding of continuity in a civilization...
...26 Ibid., pp...
...what I owe to them exceeds anything I could acknowledge here...
...For Oakeshott, it is cultivated as a substitute for, an avoidance of such action...
...the psychologists disagree on the matter...
...The metaphor further shows the extent to which Oakeshott shares the conviction of Aristotle or Arendt that politics always presupposes a prior tradition of basic agreement, a "public forum...
...9 Oakeshott, Rationalism, p. 83...
...11 More generally, all of knowledge may be dichotomized into a Rationalistic sort that Oakeshott calls "technical," formulable in precise rules and seeming to promise certainty...
...3, 83...
...Though healthy tradition is more 69 Ibid., p. 32...
...It is a matter of "exploring the intimations" of initial positions, laying bare their implications and modifying them cooperatively...
...Arendt, Human Condition, p. 177...
...authority therefore means restraint...
...It was in fact the revolutionary governments, "neither of the people nor by the people," who took action in the name of the hungry, out of pity...
...It is always opposed to another, contrasting approach, more difficult to designate, centering on the traditional, the incremental, the inarticulate...
...That is the great advantage seemingly offered by tradition: tradition is the hidden, impersonal and impartial force that will take care of these problems for us, while we remain passive and obedient to it—but not really "obedient" either, because tradition has no interests of its own and exercises no coercive power...
...And even the allegedly independent goal itself turns out to derive from the enterprise...
...121 Its task is never more than the adjudication of conflicts between private individuals or groups, together with those minor and surface adjustments that need to be made from time to time in the great, underlying tide of the society's habitual life...
...85 It is not that Oakeshott lacks sympathy with the sufferings of the poor...
...128, 129, THE ROOTS OF CONSERVATISM (which is to say, with respect to the conduct of our lives in the present...
...33 Ibid., pp...
...For it has more than a hint of the tautological about it: habit works well so long as it works well...
...Wood merely reinforces the dichotomy Oakeshott has assumed between the past as an encumbrance constraining us, and the past to be revered and served like a parent...
...he gives no attention tointermediate cases such as a heroic attempt to do something difficult and unlikely, that might just HANNA FENICHEL PITKIN An individual who strives heroically for the impossible may be willing to pay the penalty, or he may recant and be taken back into an "understanding and forgiving society...
...The conservative must be ever watchful to make continuous small adaptations in his inherited institutions "while the evil is still small...
...a public and compulsory manner of living...
...15 Ibid., p. 186...
...These do have their value, as he concedes with some reluctance, but only in the private lives of individual persons...
...Thus it is an "illusion" to suppose "that politics is ever anything more than the pursuit of intimations," or that there can ever be, in politics, "a destination to be reached or even a detectable strand of progress...
...he is a man skilled in cookery, and both his projects and his achievement spring from that skill...
...The citizens, in turn, are content to be governed, for they have what they need, and feel no reason to question their way of life, the only one they know...
...121 Ibid., pp...
...It means "acting in such a way that the coherence of the idiom of activity to which the conduct belongs is preserved and possibly enhanced...
...and what we do has social reverberations that will set the conditions of life for future generations...
...38 Sometimes, indeed, he suggests that all political goals other than stability are meaningless: in politics, men sail a boundless and bottomless sea...
...On changes in authority, see John H. Schaar, "Legitimacy in the Modern State," in Power and Community, Philip Green and Sanford Levinson, eds...
...There is no final solution or ultimate goal in politics...
...We have already noted that his resolution of the basic dichotomy between Rationalism and its opposing view is different in different realms...
...Or he might recall us to the Anglo-American traditions of constitutional liberty and self-government that are, after all, our own...
...In the end, traditions exist only in people...
...All abstract principles need to be applied in concrete cases...
...When he considers universal political participation, he considers it as a duty rather than a right or need or condition of self-development...
...In the end he is always critical of the former alternative, sometimes rejecting it, sometimes modifying, as the subject matter at issue varies...
...508 HANNA FENICHEL PITKIN indeed, he does not think one can be deliberately created...
...We shall find that Oakeshott understands much that is missed or denied by the new conservatism in America, indeed, that he might even want to disown it...
...Tradition cannot defend itself except gradually and piecemeal, or it ceases to be a tradition...
...THE ROOTS OF CONSERVATISM at Oakeshott's proposition that tradition and habit are the most reliable, or perhaps the only reliable security against tyranny and oppression...
...Moreover, conversation is a relationship of personal freedom and harmony without coercion, which continues only as the participants persuade each other...
...in politics, a "disease almost as old as the patient himself," the main "inspiration of political activity in Western Europe for the last two 61 See for example, Crick, op...
...Like Aristotle and Arendt, Oakeshott refuses to identify political rule over citizens with mere force, domination, the management of slaves, or the fabrication of objects...
...antihistorical positivists in education and epistemology...
...A worker is not free, "unless there are many potential employers of his labour," unless he has genuine options...
...The freedom of an Englishman is not something exemplified in the procedure of habeas corpus, it is, at that point, the availability of that procedure...
...Edmund Burke, "Speech on the Representation of the Commons in Parliament," in Stanlis, op...
...But outside the official system, in the streets and among the lower classes "an attentive observer could easily see from certain feverish and irregular symptoms that political life was beginning to find expression...
...they demanded dignity and justice for all mankind...
...nothing there but "languor, impotence, immobility and boredom...
...cit., p. 257...
...Nor is this only because our postFreudian sophistication precludes such naively obvious self-exposure...
...p. 489...
...The masses of the poor and uneducated are not fit to participate in political life...
...The political Rationalist wants to restructure society in fundamental ways to make it more uniform, efficient, logical...
...Nor is it true, then, that Oakeshott fails to see the potential conflict among traditions, or that the weakness of his theory is that it fails to give specific guidance for political action...
...125 120 Oakeshott, Rationalism, p. 127...
...no impulse to sail uncharted seas...
...Claims of Politics," p. 148...
...Of course, we are all part of tradition and express it in our activities...
...This is so both because a government that acts arbitrarily will meet far more resistance and therefore needs far more power than one that acts in established patterns...
...As a result, even in our modern abundance, we now lack genuine politics and political free 95 Arendt, The Human Condition (Garden City: Doubleday, 1958), pp...
...That would be (as Oakeshott himself would insist) a continuing process without resting place or fixed external goal...
...514 HANNA FENICHEL PITKIN interest...
...There is occasion neither for deviance nor for doubt...
...ways largely a question of consciousness...
...Oakeshott's is not an attractive teaching for slaves, nor for anyone whom the tradition offers "little or nothing to be used or enjoyed...
...After serving in the army 1940-45, he returned to Cambridge...
...ceases to be the critic of political habit and becomes a substitute for habit...
...113 Ibid., p. 23...
...54 Oakeshott calls it "empirical politics," equating empiricism with "doing what one wants to do" at each particular moment.55 For in the absence of ties to other people or to the past -and future, the only possible goals are private and immediate...
...And what of Oakeshott (to return from this excursion into the politics of poverty...
...Teach people that politics is about satisfying their appetites, and they are bound to teach their rulers to govern coercively and arbitrarily...
...500 HANNA FENICHEL PITKIN is impossible even to project a purpose for activity in advance of the activity itself," for the practice is the only available source of problems and questions...
...agnoses it well...
...A political conservative, by contrast, is disposed to preserve inherited institutions...
...nothing we do is unconnected with the life of our society, no activity is private in the sense of being without its place or context in the corporate social life...
...91 Ibid., p. 43...
...they are made or become political in certain times and places...
...see footnote 1], p. 43n...
...give up "false hopes...
...Otherwise, the causes are left obscure...
...84 Ibid., p. 26...
...thoughts can kill...
...Many of the best ideas in it came to me from Sara Shumer or Tracy Strong...
...86, 54...
...142 Jean Piaget, The Moral Judgment of the Child, Marjorie Gabain, trans...
...He rejects the charge that his view of politics entails any "crude determinism...
...S2 The requirements of civility and order are so complex that tradition cannot be deliberately created...
...A full discussion of the nature and significance of this ambiguity in philosophical terms unfortunately is not possible within the confines of this essay...
...Like other theorists discussed here, Oakeshott fears and opposes the introduction into politics of the spirit appropriate to economic activity and contractual relationships: those of producer and consumer, master and servant, principal and assistant—each participant seeks some service or recompense for service, and if it is not forthcoming the relationship lapses or is terminated...
...so that its only defense lies in "its resistance to the conditions productive of crisis...
...90 Ibid., p. 46...
...he presses for slow change in accord with prevailing patterns and trends...
...Oakeshott can teach us much about what Simone Weil called the "need for roots," about what we have lost in losing traditional society: stability, security, meaning, a sense of self and purpose...
...But the moral life of choice and responsibility "appears only where human behaviour is free from natural necessity," where there are genuine options...
...That is why Oakeshott says that the Rationalist misunderstands what he is doing, "fails to recognize" the "true spring" of his activity...
...There is no real connection required between politics and community...
...131 These institutions are, as Socrates already pointed out, our true parents, raising and forming us...
...Politics takes place near the surface of this deeply rooted life, making needed minor adjustments as conditions change, by referring to tradition for guidance...
...By this wise prejudice we are taught to look with horror on those children of their country who are prompt rashly to hack that aged parent in pieces and put him into the kettle of magicians, in hopes that by their poisonous weeds and wild incantations they may regenerate the paternal constitution and renovate their father's life...
...His vision omits the very stuff of political life, problematic but essential: power, interest, collective action, conflict...
...cit., p. 536...
...cit., p. 68...
...it is merely abandoned...
...80 If this limits the applicability of his theories to England and countries much like it, Oakeshott is content to accept that...
...Their remaining claims should soon be fulfilled by the pursuit of what is intimated in the tradition...
...One might imagine Oakeshott advising such a people to cling to the Empire, or to return to their native, tribal traditions...
...Just so with regard to liberty and the Empire: British tradition cannot be exported as ideology, but there is an alternative method: the method by which what is exported is the detail and not the abridgment of the tradition and the workmen travel with the tools—the method which made the British Empire...
...He engages it in battle in ways reminiscent both of Hegel's attack on merely abstract formalism that "has lost hold of the living nature of concrete fact," and of Burke's struggle with the "pure metaphysical abstractions" of the French philosophes21 Basically Oakeshott argues that the ideals the Rationalist claims as "independently premeditated" are in fact derived from and dependent on prior inarticulate activity...
...In any generation, even the most revolutionary, the arrangements which are enjoyed always far exceed those which are recognized to stand in need of attention, and those which are being prepared for enjoyment are few in comparison with those which receive amendment: the new is an insignificant proportion of the whole...
...that political life requires energy, courage, even heroism...
...78 How does a theorist otherwise so astute and sensitive come wholly to miss the possibility that a colonized people might have good reasons for associating the resident British magistrate with oppression rather than liberty...
...In addition, some Rationalist philosophers occasionally gave "another turn to the screw...
...Greenleaf, op...
...As Oakeshott himself indicates, there is a difference between ourselves and our appetites...
...New York: Harper & Row, 1967), p. 110...
...Someone who would be self-conscious must first "be certain of his ability to defend" his principles, "for having been brought into the open, they will henceforth be liable to attack...
...For our neoconservatives, of course, are Rationalists through and through: idolators of the technological, engineering spirit...
...V he desire to protect political life against a crassly acquisitive, narrowly selfish utilitarian spirit is only one in a cluster of concerns that Oakeshott shares with Aristotle, Tocqueville, and Arendt (as well as, fre quently, with Machiavelli and Burke...
...It is the reduction of politics to a mere means toward other—acquisitive and particularistic—goals that destroys it...
...As an interpretation of what we do, Rationalism can be decisively defeated if Oakeshott succeeds in showing that it is logically impossible to do what the Rationalist says we do...
...Sometimes, indeed, he sounds remarkably like Nietzsche, praising "the unself-conscious" morality of aristocrats that is nothing more than their natural "habit of behaviour in relation to one another," handed on through implicit identification, "in a true moral education...
...only that illusion or others equally arbitrary make liberty possible...
...The main thrust of his writings makes that perfectly clear...
...There must be at least two participants, perhaps more...
...19 Ibid., p. 124...
...whoever plans for the long range or invests himself in other than narrowly selfish goals is bound to fail and merely makes a useless 49 Oakeshott, Rationalism, pp...
...520 HANNA FENICHEL PITKIN omits as for what it says...
...For Burke, there was a reliable, wealthy, powerful ruling class, a "natural aristocracy" suited to govern and take care of the childlike masses...
...That is why conversation has replaced deliberation...
...148 Like Nietzsche, too, but also like Hegel and Marx and Freud, Oakeshott is profoundly concerned to produce in us the recognition of who, in particular, we are...
...in an excessively fragmented society, where no one can effectively transcend "I want," outcomes will be determined by naked coercive power...
...But as Freud saw, insight is to liberate us for action...
...169, 173...
...It is foolish of the colonized not to accept the (admitted) illusion that the magistrate is a guardian of their liberty...
...the concerns of politics are matters potentially subject to our collective will...
...The public realm—reserved, as far as memory could reach, to those who were free, namely carefree of all worries that are connected with life's necessity, with bodily needs," was now to "offer its space and light to this immense majority who are not free because they are driven by daily needs...
...125, 133...
...that he should approach to the faults of the state as to the wounds of a father, with pious awe and trembling solicitude...
...18 Oakeshott's example is, interestingly enough, the extension of the vote to women...
...We might put the matter in terms of Jean Piaget's analysis of the development of judgment in children...
...and politics itself is a conversation, sometimes among past, present, and future, sometimes among governors and governed, or among social groupings...
...cf pp...
...It is neither a matter of "obeying" the past, our parents, the superego, nor of "emancipation" from them, but of being an integrated self which contains within it those aspects of the past which it values, and uses them to master and change those aspects of past, present, and its own impulses which it does not value...
...85 Oakeshott, Rationalism, p. 174...
...137 The image is as interesting for what it 135 It may, however, be a fear of the (earlier) engulfing mother...
...Human choices are very real...
...Although continuity and tradition in sociocultural life are inevitable, something extremely valuable can be destroyed by pernicious political action, namely, coherence within the traditions that compose a civilization or society...
...Ibid., p. 172...
...Rationalism is contrasted with an orientation that appreciates the value of things as they are, inherited from the past, and that respectfully recognizes their complexity and interdependence, the richness of concrete reality...
...112, 192...
...The problem with Oakeshott's teachings is not that he is an idealistic utopian...
...129 Oakeshott's aversion to heroic politics is reflected also in still another striking difference between his views and those of the theorists we have been discussing...
...portant sense, there are no fathers in Oakeshott's world, as there still were in Burke's...
...because their reason is weak...
...81 Ibid., p. 195...
...This means that they are creatures of appetite, "driven by the needs of their bodies," and therefore not free to make genuine moral and political choices...
...If all ideologies are abbreviations of traditional activity, then it is not clear how any ideology might threaten tradition...
...148 Ibid., p. 35...
...Should it seek independence...
...70 Yet sometimes Oakeshott can also speak eloquently of the fatal flaw in tradition, its liability to become rigid and empty of meaning...
...116 Oakeshott sees that political issues are precisely those that lack technical solutions of this kind, and that the imposition of a vision of order on a society in the name of "The" correct solution destroys the mutuality essential to political life...
...87, 88...
...THE ROOTS OF CONSERVATISM because, when once roused, their passions are ungoverned...
...But such a transition re 54 For instance, Edward C. Banfield, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (New York: Free Press, 1958...
...If all politics is the pursuit of intimations, then this will be as true of ideological, radical politics as of Burkean conservatism...
...cit., p. 66...
...With its striving for uniformity and its ideological bent, Rationalism tends to insist on universal suffrage: one man, one vote...
...It seems to me that what Oakeshott ultimately wants to argue, though he is far from clear about it, is this: Rationalism as an interpretation of what we do is always wrong, because it is logically impossible to do what the Rationalist says we do...
...Those concrete details are the tradition that is to be your guide...
...to Oakeshott finds the same sort of duality in many other fields...
...his conservatism is of necessity a doctrine for a democracy in which none is to be trusted to rule...
...For a reference to "emancipation" from the past plays directly into Oakeshott's characterization of the Rationalist as someone who (falsely) perceives the past as an oppressive burden...
...The breakdown of inherited habit is most commonly the fault of false doctrine, of Rationalism...
...117 The process of mutual ad justment among human beings is endless...
...And when the poor burst into the political arena their demands were not, in fact, merely for bread...
...on this account we are free...
...36 The task of politics is to enhance the consistency, pursue what is implicit but not yet developed in the existing patterns, reduce conflict 3 7 The failure of politics takes the form of increased conflict and fragmentation...
...Rationalism, p. 187...
...But in Rationalism, "the intellect...
...51 Or rather, it tries to do so, but it is unable to create...
...It is a system of ideas abstracted from the manner in which people have been accustomed to go about the business of attending to the arrangements of their societies...
...It does not matter that "the lives of most men do not revolve around a felt necessity to speak...
...See Oakeshott, Rationalism, pp...
...But at a number of central points in this configuration of doctrine, Oakeshott's views are also strikingly different from those of the other theorists in this tradition...
...Oakeshott acknowledges his debt toMichael Polanyi more than once...
...and Michael Oakeshott, "Science and Society," Cambridge Journal, 1 (August 1948) : 689-697, at692n...
...cit., pp...
...28 Ibid., pp...
...3o Ibid., p. 124...
...114 The metaphor thus illuminates what we already noted in Oakeshott's sociological vision of human community: a profound concern for individual development, for opportunity and personal freedom, together with an appreciation of rootedness and mutual responsibility...
...In that kind of game, in the end, the people are sure to be the losers...
...What is required for free, genuine political life is neither a certain class status nor a certain subjectmatter but a certain spirit, and that spirit is not the automatic prerogative of any social group...
...148 Oakeshott, Rationalism, p. 35...
...And the resulting fear of being overwhelmed by powerful destructive passions can be just as compelling...
...Burke always insists that our inherited institutions, the legacy of our fathers, must be regarded as we regard the fathers themselves, in order to give "to our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood," to bind up "the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties...
...For Oakeshott, what is inappropriate to politics is anything that smacks of passion, zeal, commitment, heroism, or the pursuit of perfection...
...5, 118...
...but its basic structure is always the juxtaposition of two contrasting approaches to the activity in question...
...75 For a sudden or major social crisis may well demand a degree or velocity of adaptation greater than tradition can muster...
...and our political principles and institutions are the precipitates of earlier traditional activity, evolved without conscious general plan...
...It is not, itself, politics...
...THE ROOTS OF CONSERVATISM...
...Although Oakeshott is always in one or another way critical of Rationalism, this does not mean that he is hostile to reason or to rationality.' Rationalism is no more equivalent to rationality than scientism to science or moralism to morality...
...He would like it to be an end-in-itself like friendship, yet he fears the intrinsic values that they ascribe to active citizenship almost as much as he fears the utilitarian spirit...
...J. W. N. Watkins, "Political Tradition and Political Theory," Philosophical Quarterly, 2 (October 1952) : 323-337, at 334 ff...
...Note also Oakeshott's secondary, unpublished definition, cited in footnote 28...
...But to see this, and how it is so, we shall have to go a more circuitous route...
...42 Ibid., p. 122...
...Even a moment's thought about historical fact can show us that there is virtually no physical necessity so dire that it totally destroys the human will, the capacity for choice...
...This essay, then, is concerned with the thought of Michael Oakeshott, with occasional glances backward toward Edmund Burke and sideways toward Hannah Arendt...
...Politics, Oakeshott always maintains, is a conversation...
...The pursuit of perfection is both impious and unavoidable in human life...
...V1 erhaps it is not inappropriate to approach the nature of this deficiency in Oakeshott's theory by way of a psychological analysis, particularly since he is almost as much concerned with education and morality as with government...
...48 This is related, in turn, to a further grim consequence of trying to act Rationalistically in politics, seen by both Oakeshott and 44 Ibid., p. 40 45 Ibid., p. 42...
...Oakeshott really does think about politics in terms of conversation rather than deliberation (let alone any more strident activity), in terms of the pleasant, somewhat idle but also valuable, civilized talk of university dons over their afternoon sherry...
...p. 48...
...132 If you challenge them, you endanger 130 An excellent discussion of alternative conceptions of tradition, including traditions with heroic founders, is contained in J. G. A. Pocock, "Time, Institutions and Action: An Essay on Traditions and Their Understanding," in King and Parekh, op...
...bureaucrats in government, truly engaged in "the politics of empiricism" that sells out the future in return for present private profit or hasty accom modation to the latest civil disturbance...
...93 Oakeshott accepts the universal adult suffrage that Burke could still oppose, but their views of political participation by the masses are the same...
...even after a revolution the great bulk of social patterns remains the same...
...New York: Random House, 1970...
...On the contrary, most are mere bundles of felt needs unenlarged and unrestrained by any tradition of civility...
...35 Ibid., p. 94...
...What, then, is wrong with this idyllic picture...
...Albert Camus, The Rebel, Anthony Bower, trans...
...it is an art, not a science...
...only the practice tells us how to apply it...
...In a good conversation, all participate in the gradual revelation of a shared truth, but probably differing from the initial position taken by any of them...
...Similarly, it regards its parents as eternal, omniscient, and omnipotent...
...Similarly, conservatism is psychologically likely "wherever a firm identity has been achieved, and wherever identity is felt to be precariously balanced...
...We have consecrated the state, that no man should approach to look into its defects or corruptions but with due caution...
...He sees that we should not have to choose between individuality and community, that true personal development and true Gemeinschaft enhance each other...
...HANNA FENICHEL PITKIN sense, rational conduct "is behaviour deliberately directed to the achievement of a formulated purpose and is governed solely by that purpose...
...304, 311...
...105 Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, Stuart Gilbert, trans...
...At any given historical point, the arrangements which constitute a society capable of political activity, whether they are customs or institutions or laws or diplomatic decisions, are at once coherent and incoherent...
...2 He is profoundly aware of the complexity of institutions, customs, ways of life, the extent to which a society is a living whole...
...Arrangements which in their beginnings promoted a dispersion of power," for instance, "often, in the course of time, themselves become over-mighty or even absolute.74 " Even more dangerous, however, is the characteristic inability of tradition to cope with crises...
...From this perspective, maturity has to do with becoming aware of one's own role, one's own responsibility in upholding, transmitting, changing, or replacing inherited institutions and values...
...In politics, Oakeshott calls it "conservatism," or "the pursuit of intimations...
...There is, of course, truth in this, but what alternative does Oakeshott envisage...
...Oakeshott, "Contemporary British Politics," p. 474...
...tle...
...he is more astute and subtle than consistent, and sometimes he can see with remarkable clarity the limitations of his own teachings...
...Thus, the Rationalist's belief in an abstract "technical knowledge" and in goals set without reliance on any inherited tradition is an "illusion...
...He sees the damage done to people—living and suffering human beings—when their lives become fragmented and chaotic, when there is no history and no fixed home, when all possessions are plastic and "disposable," when all agencies are impersonal and faceless, when all sense of continuity is lost so that people become, in Burke's memorable phrase, "little better than the flies of a summer...
...149 Ibid., p. 184...
...is never offered the blank sheet of infinite possibility...
...The enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel...
...And, conversely, it is precisely those new to the political realm who need the Rationalistic style...
...All that stands between us and our murderous passion against those we love and need is the acquired habit of traditional behavior, of non-thought...
...73 Thus people are not likely to accept their inherited station and its duties indefinitely, if the tradition yields them nothing of real benefit...
...We see a happy, peaceful arrangement in which diversified individuals pursue their separate goals in their separate ways, and yet, without having to think or do much about it, they find that their private activity produces harmonious public results...
...102 Arendt, On Revolution, p. 69...
...We saw that he shares with them a stress on mutuality in politics, a distinction between political rule and domination, and a consequent stress on the need for a political arena—a framework of law or institutions, a tradition of civility—within which politics becomes possible...
...Bernard Crick, "The World of Michael Oakeshott," Encounter, 20 (June 1963): 65-74, at 68...
...Politics is "a limited activity, a necessary but second-rate affair...
...43 For it is character that determines how institutions will operate, no matter how they are formally constructed...
...mmunity...
...that seeks individuality within Gemeinschaft...
...There is no place for them, at least, outside art and academia, no place in the realm of actions as distinct from thought...
...They look, indeed, rather like the upper ranks of the British civil service: university educated, cultivated, cautious, eminently suited to administer a civilized conversation...
...But he also cites Burke approvingly, and the parallels as well as the differences between the two conservatisms are instructive...
...518 Even Burke, fearful as he was of passion, gave politics more weight and dignity than that...
...The alternative would be a conception of politics that accepts the reality of conflict, interest, and power, but undertakes to enlist these problematic elements in a continual reconstruction of community...
...110 Such relationships and activities contrast with others, like friendship, pursued for their intrinsic value, and in which the other participants are valued for themselves rather than as a means to some other end...
...John C. Rees, "Professor Oakeshott on Political Education," Mind, 62 (January 1953) : 68-74, at 70...
...23 Ibid., pp...
...25 Oakeshott, Rationalism, p. 75...
...And there are those in the tradition of political theory who would argue that this is the worst deprivation of all...
...for example, in higher education vocational training is flatly dismissed as inappropriate to a university...
...Human Condition, pp...
...22 We live first and think afterward, and our thought is derivative from what we do...
...But that need not make the task impossible...
...THE ROOTS OF CONSERVATISM are not really opposites, but two ways of looking at the same set of phenomena...
...His politics will be conducted cautiously and minimally, refusing to have anything to do "with innovations designed to meet merely hypothetical situations...
...and because only habit can reliably restrain the passions of the rulers themselves, can keep them in their proper role of "neutral umpire" rather than that of one of the players...
...Why should "we" give "them" any more power to interfere with "our" lives than we absolutely have to...
...It can only evolve gradually and inarticulately over generations...
...they helped themselves to what they needed economically outside of politics, by forcibly excluding from the political realm those who needed to raise economic questions...
...Thus, like Burke, Aristotle, and Arendt, Oakeshott argues for the importance of limits in politics...
...Oakeshott, it seems to me, attempts to avoid full acknowledgment of that task by insisting that "philosophy" is different from "doctrine," the task of the former being to "explain" while that of the latter is to "recommend conduct...
...THE ROOTS OF CONSERVATISM "slow, small changes" only...
...73 Ibid., p. 169...
...24 Accordingly, Rationalistic morality is "not, by itself, a possible form of morality at all...
...if you care for them tenderly, you are cherishing your parents...
...We are to remain in a lifelong apprenticeship to past generations...
...sometimes she seems to stress that the point is consciousness, yet the idea of the pressure of causal, physical necessity is central to her argument...
...What is missing, in psychoanalytic terms, is any conception of sublimation as distinct from repression, of ego functions, and therefore of genuinely mature mastery...
...cit., pp...
...A moral tradition originating in the powerful spiritual experience of one generation may well become pointless formality for the people of a later time...
...13o In his view, all tradition originates in the unknown recesses of past history, as the unplanned product of countless uncoordinated private choices...
...46 Ibid., p. 41...
...132-133...
...42-43, 187, 193-194...
...that is realistically skeptical of easy or technical answers...
...29 In accord with Oakeshott's definition, then, politics is necessarily "the pursuit, not of a dream, or of a general principle, but of the intimations implicit in a given tradition...
...For our private activities make just as much of a contribution to the great, underlying stream of our civilization as any explicitly political action...
...103I say "really fear" in order to give them all the benefit of every doubt...
...Each of us normally perceives only a small and personal part of that whole, but in fact the conditions of our lives, and even our very selves, are the products of culture and history...
...5o Ibid., p. 5. 51 Ibid., p. 22...
...145 It is not easy to express without paradox the relationship we bear to our parents and our past in a condition of maturity so conceived...
...and we ourselves, carriers of the society, will continue through those changes...
...This may be very similar to what Oakeshott means when he accuses Marxism of bringing to politics an ideology that is an abridgment of nonpolitical activity and hence "inappropriate on account of the irrelevance of the activity from which it has been abstracted...
...Oakeshott rejects that risk as unacceptable because he does not think such forces can be controlled or enlisted...
...There was thus "an incoherence in the arrangements of the society which pressed convincingly for remedy...
...The most perceptive understanding may come not from a hurried look at the phenomenon itself, but through distance, theory, and an examination of roots...
...For Oakeshott, ultimately, symbols are all arbitrary...
...Oakeshott's favorite metaphor for understanding political life is that of conversation...
...among peers whose views are mutually relevant to their shared enterprise...
...For conservatism is not just one phenomenon but many...
...Rees, op...
...68 All the Rationalist can do if his program fails is to replace it by another...
...91 He does not mean, of course, that the major part of mankind has no needs...
...20 For example, J. G. Blumler, "Politics, Poetry, and Practice," Political Studies, 12 (October 1964): 353-361, at 357...
...They range far beyond a mere stress on tradition as we have discussed it, and they deserve more detailed exploration...
...But someone who has genuinely come to terms with his past, with his parents—who has, as Nietzsche would say, successfully "digested" the past, integrating what is valuable to him into his self—such a person can "forget about" the past in a different sense...
...The former is much like school education, but narrowly specialized...
...He was at Nuffield College, Oxford, in 1949-50, and went to the London School of Economics as University Professor of Political Science in 1951...
...105 But that man, as was perfectly clear to Tocqueville by 1850, was not the starving worker but the shopkeeper, "the middle class, which...
...109 It was this realization that the givenness of necessity depends to some extent on consciousness, and consciousness in turn is shaped by our activity, that gave Tocqueville hope...
...133 The real danger is parricide, and the profundity of that danger is correlated to the depths of men's hidden hatred of authority, constantly pressing for release within them...
...otherwise he could not possibly recommend the enhancing of coherence as the central task of political adjustments in tradition.83 Nor does Oakeshott believe that everything old or traditional is ipso facto good...
...It cannot defend itself where it has no supporters, and it will not be supported by those whom it gives "little or nothing to be used or enjoyed...
...aT Arendt, Human Condition, p. 195...
...126 Deliberation suggests gravity, serious issues, statesmen and judgment, and the intention that at the end of the talking, action will coinmence...
...11 Ibid., p. 215...
...76 Ibid., pp...
...Extrapolating a pattern from them is precisely the problem in finding the right political course...
...The result is not that they act Rationalistically, for that is impossible, but that they act differently from people who believe otherwise, for instance, from those who believe in conservatism...
...For slaves, perpetuation of the tradition and enhanced coherence in it can only mean a systematization of their oppression...
...like human life itself, it is continual, restless activity...
...143 In that realm we are never to regard our institutions and practices as the historical product of fallible human beings like ourselves...
...cable.69 The politics of tradition and habit, by contrast, is "of course, pre-eminently fluid," just as habitual morality is distinguished by its "elasticity and its ability to suffer change without disruption...
...But one can hate an absent or faceless or ineffectual father as much as a powerful one— hate him, indeed, partly for his very ineffectuality...
...498 foundation constructed exclusively from one's own direct experience and "reason...
...One wants to object: no wonder the political debates of those aristocrats were above mere economics and devoted to "higher things...
...This may, of course, be the truth...
...As we shall see in the next section, this is also Oakeshott's definition of politics...
...32 Ibid., p. 125...
...All of the theorists in this tradition see political life as a distinctive form of human organization of special value, the locus of freedom and honor and full human development...
...this is seen as a fact useful for social stability, not a failure in human development...
...Everything that we do is "communal" in the sense of allowing us to promote the "collective interest" of our society and thus fulfill our "duty" to the public...
...Sometimes it is treated as theory, an interpretation that purports to describe what we actually do...
...124, 125...
...Only, there is then no joy in that choice, no real reason for making it...
...That is part of what it means to say, as we did earlier, that political theory attempts to define the interface between what must be accepted as necessary and what can be altered through active intervention...
...23 As soon as we try to put the goal or ideal into practice, we are forced to interpret and apply it by means of the traditional skills of the activity...
...in the realm of action, for instance in politics and morality, he prefers that there be no actual living masters, no mature actors at all...
...And will is not a functional basis for politics...
...An abstraction by itself, without the complex concrete practice that underlies it, is meaningless and useless...
...at other times, as a style or manner of conduct...
...the desire to call everything into question, rethink it for oneself de novo, rebuild on a new and more secure 6 Because of the differences in resolution of the problem in different realms, which will be discussed further below, Bernard Crick is wrong to suppose that "it matters little which we examine in detail...
...that he falsely equates age with goodness, failing to see that some traditions are harmful...
...Oakeshott refuses to invoke any such Rationalistic concepts in support of his conservatism...
...135 What Oakeshott does say—and it is interesting and revealing enough—is that our identity, our very selves depend entirely on the preservation of continuity with the past...
...And this sociological insight has its counterpart in Oakeshott's specifically political doctrine, in his profound awareness that a fundamental plurality and mutuality is essential to politics...
...71 Ibid., p. 65...
...Greenleaf, op...
...43 Oakeshott, Rationalism, p. 6. of which stands alone...
...8 Michael Oakeshott, "Scientific Politics," Cambridge Journal, 1 (March 1948): 347-358, at 348, 349, 354...
...This is the most general condition of our freedom...
...504 HANNA FENICHEL PITKIN Burke: the loss of continuity over time, and the resulting reduction of all goals to impulsive 'appetite...
...124 Ibid., p. 189...
...To sense the difference, we need only contrast the connotations of Oakeshott's favorite concept of "conversation" with those of its counterpart in Burke, almost never used by Oakeshott: "deliberation...
...As a result, his teachings come in the end to resemble the utilitarian-liberal tradition with its minimal, caretaker conception of government, much more than he is aware or would wish...
...the appeal to tradition is in this respect no different from natural law or utilitarianism or social contract doctrine or Marxism...
...Aristotle, Politics, Ernest Barker, trans...
...Still, it is instructive to look in somewhat greater detail...
...New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1958), pp...
...Thus science may be regarded either Rationalistically, as a body of achieved knowledge made explicit in systematic theories and hypotheses...
...p. 133...
...THE ROOTS OF CONSERVATISM every citizen would be a hero and become personally immortal...
...153 To be sure, the specialists of government should not be narrow, Rationalistic technicians...
...Oakeshott is fully aware that all societies contain multiple traditions, and that these are always to some extent in conflict...
...81 (But is an understanding of the realities of the British Empire not part of an accurate British self-knowledge...
...he cannot modify, for everything is explicit and therefore irrevo 87 What he says is that the growth of Rationalism in Europe has been owing primarily to the advent of newcomers into politics—new men, new nations, new classes—a topic we shall discuss below...
...124 Thus Oakeshott agrees with the utilitarian liberals he otherwise criticizes that government is an "umpire," and freedom means being left to do as one likes in one's privacy...
...He is profoundly concerned to warn against the dangers of Rationalism, radicalism, and ideology...
...It seems clear to me that this is because ultimately Oakeshott believes, like Burke, that the structures of civilization are "illusions," that if people saw through them to the true realities of need and passion and force, those structures could not survive...
...And even as a duty, he rejects it...
...7+ Ibid., p. 41...
...95 Thus Aristotle maintained that a slave was by nature unsuited to be self-governing, and recommended the exclusion of mechanics and artisans from citizenship because of their inappropriate "spirit...
...a Each separate successive difficulty is then supposed to be met ad hoc, "by the application of `reason' uncontaminated by custom, habit, or prejudice...
...there are better and worse political outcomes, wise and unwise policies...
...That hidden hatred is so powerful and so dangerous that one must guard against it at every step...
...He acknowledges that "from one point of view, property is a form of power, and an institution of property is a particular way of organizing the exercise of this form of power in a society...
...131 Burke, Reflections, p. 38...
...of abstract citation of God's justice independent of any embodying tradition, that he fundamentally opposed in Enlightenment thought...
...Indeed, that is precisely the danger of Rationalism...
...106 Alexis de Tocqueville, Recollections, George Lawrence, trans., J. P. Mayer and A. P. Kerr, eds...
...cit., pp...
...132 Plato, Crito, 50...
...46 Again, this cannot be achieved by mere legislation or the imposition of new forms...
...Rational deliberations, action, innovation, sometimes work well and sometimes fail, as everyone knows...
...Neal Wood, for example, in his excellent article on Oakeshott, insists on the vital necessity that at least "sometimes we emancipate ourselves from the past and confront the present in its own terms...
...Garden City: Doubleday, 1971), p. 6. 107 Ibid., p. 13...
...It is the vicious circle of a fragmented society that social contract theorists call "the state of nature" and modern sociology calls "amoral familism" or "the culture of poverty...
...But the problems of politics are problems of choice and change...
...22, 195, 189...
...This is the vision of a healthy political life developed by theorists like Tocqueville and Machiavelli: the continual transformation of private need and partial perspective into an enlarged awareness of the whole...
...Neal Wood, "A Guide to the Classics: the Skepticism of Professor Oakeshott," Journal of Politics, 21 (November 1959): 647-662, at 647...
...Although Oakeshott is concerned with a form of higher education that will prepare people to become mature masters in the spheres of culture and intellect...
...89 Knowing only the endlessness of physical labor and the endless pressure of hunger and physical need, the animal laborans demanded food instead of freedom, happiness instead of honor...
...22-23...
...98 Arendt thinks that this was what destroyed the French Revolution, made it unable to be a genuine foundation of political liberty for the majority...
...When we try to substitute Rationalistic ideology for habit in politics, Oakeshott says, "the life of a society loses its rhythm and continuity and is resolved into a succession of problems and crises...
...Arendt blames Marx for bringing the spirit of "labor" into the political arena where only "action" is appropriate...
...and they come to politics only when they happen to "have nothing better to think about," or when they have some concrete, practical grievance that needs attention...
...In the end, as Oakeshott himself would insist, our problems are not his to solve, but ours...
...In general these piecemeal, relatively natural changes are easily absorbed by the system and do no serious harm...
...All of the theorists in this tradition other than Oakeshott are led by such concerns to problems of founding, to questions of how such an arena can be created among men and how, once created, it can be maintained...
...Conversation, by contrast, implies a less directed, less purposeful but perhaps more pleasurable talking, enjoyed for its own sake and for what it will reveal rather than for any agreement in which it may conclude...
...private monopoly in all its forms," and where that is impossible, public operation of the enterprise...
...87 Ibid., p. 46...
...It 21 G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, J. B. Baillie, trans...
...but the various kinds of know-how and habitual practice cannot really be taught or learned, "but only imparted and acquired...
...they are bound to be misunderstood...
...Reason, which has the "power to rescue from superstition, is given the task of generating human behaviour—a task which, in fact, it cannot perform...
...He teaches us to distrust the pretensions of the "social engineer" who offers allegedly easy solutions to our vexing public problems, claiming with pseudo-authority that they are "scientific" solutions...
...And though Oakeshott is right to insist that political action is always undergirded by a prior, inarticulate political culture, still, that culture only undergirds political action...
...consequently, "wherever a means of production falls under the control of a single power, slavery in some measure follows...
...70 Ibid., p. 64...
...8 Indeed, one of the realms with respect to which Oakeshott traces out the dichotomy between Rationalism and its opposite is reason itself: there is a Rationalistic understanding of reason, and another based on coherence in a tradition...
...The alternative to technical education is apprenticeship...
...But the task is difficult, for the only language in which one can appeal to the bourgeois, in which he himself can conceptualize what he experiences in political activity, is the language of utilitarian self 108 Arendt, On Revolution, p. 53...
...HANNA FENICHEL PITKIN 512 dom...
...He insists that political rule is a relationship, if not among equals—since we know that people are always unequal in power, wealth, ability, character—at least 112 As in education one learns to "recognize" oneself in "the mirror of" one's civilization...
...that in the absence of a repressive conscience, our love could not restrain the passion of our hate...
...One participant may be more persuasive or better informed than others and may prevail for a time, but "none permanently dominates...
...11' It is not difficult to see why the metaphor attracts him: conversation is a relationship of plurality and mutuality, of self-development...
...Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence," p. 359...
...But it is in the realm of politics that Oakeshott clearly has the greatest difficulty in finding an appropriate manner of resolution...
...65, 70...
...In the French Revolution the previously dominant understanding of what was inevitable was called into question...
...82 Samuel Coleman, "Is there Reason in Tradition...
...but only that all members consider what they do primarily as a way to sustain their own lives and those of their families...
...The Rationalist might advocate women's suffrage in terms of natural rights or some other abstract principle, but for the conservative "the only cogent reason" was "that in all or most other important respects" women had already been enfranchised...
...He became a fellow of the College two years later and was for many years a university lecturer in history...
...Political life has to do with precisely those concerns that are made into issues for public action, that are not permitted to drift or emerge from uncoordinated private conduct...
...cit., p. 336...
...Some of the available traditions, perhaps all, may even be hostile to the substantive qualities he cherishes in politics: liberty, the rule of law, free private enterprise...
...The problems of other societies, he says, are questions that "we need not try to answer: we are concerned with .ourselves as we are...
...Cf...
...and like parents, they are mortal...
...for the conception of "know-how," compare Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1949), chap...
...12 Oakeshott, Rationalism, pp...
...86 Aristotle, op...
...As Burke said, The most poor, illiterate, and uninformed creatures upon earth are judges of a practical oppression...
...77 Ibid., pp...
...Aristotle certainly seems to have abandoned hope for the transforming of artisans or slaves into citizens...
...they compose a pattern and at the same time they intimate a sympathy for what does not fully appear —as yet...
...and for Machiavelli as for Tocqueville, that revivification, the task of maintaining a public forum once it has been founded, depends on conflict and action...
...he essentially wants to deny that human beings have the capacity for large-scale or collective creation, for any but artistic creation...
...77 But one " must surely suppose that in politics the problem will be, if anything, even greater, for as Oakeshott stresses, politics is the sphere of change par excellence...
...But it is a slow and costly method...
...Thus, practical scientific theories and concepts derive their meaning only from the activity of scientists...
...Oakeshott also shares with the theorists in this tradition a healthy realism and skepticism about what is possible in politics...
...Yet the critics are right to sense that there is something fundamentally wrong with Oakeshott's traditionalism in relation to political action...
...his slogans enchant, while the resident magistrate is seen only as a sign of servility...
...41 Oakeshott, Rationalism, p. 121...
...It is a terrible mistake —though not uncommon today—to identify the real self with the id...
...Aristotle and Arendt faced much the same ambiguities...
...103 And that orientation in fact was not introduced into politics after 1789 by the raging, hungry masses, but by the bourgeoisie...
...76 Once a major crisis has arisen—as he acknowledges at least in the realm of morality —tradition "has little power of recovery," precisely because it is inarticulate and unselfconscious, lacking "the power to criticize, to reform, and to explain itself...
...In its absence, in the "groves" of the Rationalist's "academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows...
...59 If this transition does not itself resolve conflict, it makes the resolution of conflict possible...
...57 It makes no allowances, in Aristotelian terms, for going beyond the securing of life and to the pursuit of the good life...
...72 Ibid., p. 77...
...Whether for an individual or for a community, the new always presents itself as a threat to selfhood, against which defensive action must be taken...
...66 What Oakeshott is really saying when he directs us to "tradition" as a basis for political decisions seems to be threefold: First, do not introduce principles or institutions alien to the indigenous traditions...
...For all of them, acceptance of the self and of past history matters because it is a prerequisite for free and effective action in the present, into the future...
...continuities persist through even the most abrupt and traumatic historical crises...
...Since politics proper is the restricted province of specialists, it is clear why Oakeshott is anxious to keep its power to a minimum...
...118-119...
...But as a mere interpretation that cannot become practice, Rationalism constitutes no danger...
...Second, strive always to enhance coherence within (among) the existing tradition(s...
...THE ROOTS OF CONSERVATISM in the process, learns to see himself in the mirror of the conversation...
...522 HANNA FENICHEL PITKIN continually "emancipating" himself from the past, which he nevertheless cannot shed, that he has no energy to spare for "confronting the present in its own terms...
...Machiavelli himself knew better, Oakeshott says, and offered the new prince "notonly his book, but also, what would make up for the inevitable deficiencies of his book—himself...
...34 Yet he well knows that even the most abstract theory can have consequences for action if people believe in it, particularly in politics...
...In part, it seems to me, Oakeshott's ambiguity about what's wrong with Rationalism derives from his unwillingness to abandon the power of the philosophical mode of argument, even —or rather, especially—when he wants to warn us against the practical evils of Rationalism...
...141 With respect to higher education, Oakeshott gives us two contrasting models: that of training and that of apprenticeship...
...108 The result was a total absence of real political life in the supposedly "political" institutions...
...This means, further, that neither our society nor our civilization is a contractual arrangement, which we can renegotiate whenever we find it profitable to do so...
...And the advice to look to tradition and enhance coherence by pursuing intimations is simply meaningless where no worthwhile tradition exists...
...17 He sees the task of politics as being to enhance the coherence in a nation's inherited culture and institutions by developing what is implicit in them but "does not fully appear" as yet...
...72 Oakeshott also recognizes that the preservation of tradition does depend on the objective quality of the inheritance...
...Rationalism seems to offer what they need, being "the politics of the book," a set of simple rules, an ideological abridgment, an easy "how to do it" course...
...27 Accordingly, politics itself is defined by Oakeshott as "the activity of attending to the general arrangements of a set of people whom chance or choice have brought together," and "who, in respect of their common recognition of a manner of attending to its arrangements, compose a single...
...109-110...
...It does mean restraint, authority, and the internalization of norms, but not as mere duty owed to some external other—rather, as genuinely desired by the integrated self...
...This does mean control of the id, for the sake of real gratification and a developed, individuated self...
...Ibid., P. 49...
...136 Oakeshott, Rationalism, p. 170...
...8-10...
...The matter is not that simple...
...154 But those who govern are no Burkean aristocracy either...
...2° From the time when Oakeshott begins to be concerned with Rationalism (or its equivalent by other names), he is also con 17 Ibid., pp...
...But it seems clear that in our time, "recalling" us to such ideas, or any ideas, is not enough...
...But as we shall see, Oakeshott is profoundly ambivalent about how to classify politics in this regard...
...The alternative approach sees rationality as differently defined in each realm of human activity and thus as a matter of internal coherence within each realm...
...and as critics have pointed out, there are some crucial differences between them, particularly Oakeshott's determination to make his case without metaphysical concepts such as divine purpose or natural law...
...p. 176...
...What he saw in America was the possibility that the narrowly selfish acquisitiveness, the fragmentation and competitiveness that characterized the great middleclass economy of the future might—just possibly might—be educated to the political spirit the older aristocracy had known, through active participation in democratic self-government...
...THE ROOTS OF CONSERVATISM 513 from it "protection...
...Political education, he says, means learning to participate in a conversation...
...He cannot or will not follow a Tocqueville or a Machiavelli here, for he fears too much the destructive potential of the forces their solutions enlist...
...We feel helpless in proportion as we remain passive...
...there can be no meaningful destination at all...
...13 These conflicting approaches to rationality, knowledge, science, 10 Ibid., p. 102...
...and all of the participants matter to the conversation...
...The concern for a public forum within which persuasion can replace force is also a central theme in Thucydides...
...the very existence of a self depend on rejecting the latter and guarding the former against it...
...150 Unfortunately, like Hegel but unlike the other great teachers of self-knowledge, Oakeshott insists that we recognize and accept the given as necessary not just with respect to our past, but with respect to the future as well 147 See particularly Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, Walter Kaufmann, trans...
...85 Oakeshott does not fora moment think that in directing us to tradition for political guidance, he is directing us to ready, unambiguous answers...
...under the pressure of the poor, we have achieved plenty but lost liberty...
...But there is a more serious and less obvious disadvantage to the traditionalist view...
...Oakeshott links Rationalism directly with the problem of newcomers in politics...
...The seemingly uncontrollable movement of American policy toward domestic repression and imperial warfare makes it of the utmost urgency that we understand what is involved in our "new conservatism...
...But mostly he would have to give them non-advice: you are in a most unfortunate situation...
...It is the province of certain specialists 151 Need I say that I am not proposing that Oakeshott resembles Plato in all, or many, respects...
...Aristotle accepted this situation as natural...
...An earlier work on epistemology, Experience and Its Modes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933), cannot be discussed within the confines of this essay...
...Yet this is not, in fact, a position that Oakeshott is content to adopt...
...In Oakeshott's famous analogy, "a cook is not a man who first has a vision of a pie and then tries to make it...
...that the continuing resolution of conflict and reintegration of ambivalence cannot be relied upon to prevent disaster...
...That there is a psychic component in the conservative's anxiety about the careful preservation of the past is no secret, being revealed most clearly in Burke's unselfconscious (because pre-Freudian) metaphors...
...118 Oakeshott, Rationalism, p. 49...
...it for its own sake, as they do...
...This elaborate structure is constantly in the process of change, largely as the result of individuals' private choices and activities...
...112, 123...
...Oakeshott sees also the extent to which the patterns and regularities in a culture remain piecemeal and unarticulated, how they are learned from concrete, paradigmatic instances, perpetuated in some instances, changed in other instances...
...Part of Oakeshott's ambiguity about what's wrong with Rationalism clearly has to do with a corresponding uncertainty about what Rationalism is, and with what sorts of weapons it may best be defeated...
...338-418...
...Sometimes Rationalism is simply rejected outright, and the opposing view is adopted as Oakeshott's own...
...it drove them, until "freedom had to be surrendered to necessity, to the urgency of the life process itself...
...But that way of conceptualizing the world is itself the disease...
...But this is not a fully accurate account of Oakeshott's position...
...All other theorists in this tradition see that in the absence of final or technical solutions, politics always involves risk...
...they compose a pattern and at the same time they contain conflicts and inconsistencies...
...They are busy with other enterprises, their myriad private pursuits...
...87 Recognizing that the institutions of economic power are creatures of law, "not something that springs up of its own accord," 88 Oakeshott favors political intervention to suppress 83 Ibid., p. 25...
...It is achieved by keeping all forms of social power dispersed, the power of government itself at a minimum, just a little bit more than any other "center of power" in the society has.45 Where "power is dispersed...
...147 He has stopped being either trainee or apprentice and has become a master, free for action...
...they wield no real power, and their decisions should have no serious or widespread consequences...
...they are the gyroscope that keeps the ship of state on an even keel...
...101 And as she also knows, it was not the poor themselves who, driven by the iron law of their physical need, demanded of the French Revolution an economic largesse which it could not give...
...On the other hand, it is difficult to believe in the great value that theorists like Aristotle, Tocqueville, and Arendt attach to political life, if, by definition, it is impotent to deal with the real needs of most people...
...47 Ibid., pp...
...And if it attains independence, how should it guide its political conduct...
...84 There is a "positive prejudice" in its favor, "in favor of the yet untried...
...THE ROOTS OF CONSERVATISM continuities in culture and society to the point where "there's nothing new under the sun...
...cit., p. 72...
...Crick, op...
...39 But on a boundless sea there is not merely no "appointed" destination...
...it is best not even to approach and look...
...1211 Oakeshott, Rationalism, p. 59...
...The participants bring to the process ever newly conflicting purposes and desires, ever shifting alliances and configurations of power...
...that for both these reasons the appeal to tradition provides no reliable guidance for actual political decisions.61 But it seems clear to me that Oakeshott does see the things his critics claim he fails to see...
...But the problem is more complicated...
...But Oakeshott refuses to think of tradition as founded at all...
...For Oakeshott, what is natural, the real, inner, passionate self, is always resistant and murderous...
...28 Oakeshott himself explains that he says "attending to" rather than "making" arrangements to emphasize the necessary continuity involved, the fact that at least in the "hereditary cooperative groups" called "states," political activity 24 Ibid., p. 99...
...the alternative to a morality of explicit precepts is identification with an authoritative model...
...It is characteristic that Oakeshott identifies heroism with attempting to do the impossible...
...The predominant ideology of newly politicized classes in the last hundred years Oakeshott takes to be Marxism, "the most stupendous of our political Rationalisms...
...And if we are concerned to preserve the tradition of free self-government in America—flawed and feeble as it may be— then we shall have to take the responsibility of putting that tradition into action, in relation to the real necessities of people's lives...
...Oakeshott's case in point is America, which began with "a specific and express rejection of tradition" and whose politics has been Rationalistic ever since.S4 Besides new rulers and new nations, Rationalism also appeals to strata of society newly emergent into public life...
...where the existing patterns conflict, act so as to reduce that conflict...
...64, 65...
...58, 74...
...As Arendt knows, the early organizations of workers and the poor were the only group "which not only defended its economic interests but fought a full-fledged political bat loo Arendt, Human Condition, p. 115...
...More than one tradition is available here, and very little hope of coherence...
...Such a forum is not, of course, a physical place—though the agora was certainly a constitutive element in Greek political life—but the organization of people in a public, political way.115 Only where people are already bound by some minimal ties of reciprocity and civility is a political relationship possible at all, as an alternative to domination and naked force...
...as Marx argued, once we understand the world, the point is to change it...
...as Ibid., p. 47...
...he would prefer to eliminate purpose from politics altogether...
...it is an image of anxiety and defense, in which every novelty is a danger because a temptation, and the very thought of challenging the authority of the past threatens inner stability...
...In short, political activity comes first and a political ideology follows after.26 Even the ideology of the French Revolution, the ultimate in Rationalistic abstraction, although certainly the product of reflection, was not the product of reflection in advance of activity, but an extrapolation from traditional English political practice...
...Michael Oakeshott, "The Idea of a University," Listener, 47 (March 9, 1950): 424-426, at 424...
...But as an actual style of conduct in politics, morality, education, Rationalism can be a real danger, its evil consequences evident in the world around us...
...S6 Like all power, it limits the freedom, the choices, of those subject to it...
...it is impossible for any "actual engagement" in activity ever to "spring from or be governed by an independently premeditated end...
...What is so noble about that picture...
...It is important to note that there is variation not merely in realms of activity, but also in the way Rationalism is conceived...
...In that sense Oakeshott is right: there is such a thing as the Rationalist who rejects history and claims to construct all anew in the present, to be as it were father to himself, in order to deny his real father...
...by continuous contact with one who is perpetually practicing it...
...It involves the penalties of impiety (the anger of the gods and social isolation), and its reward is not that of achievement but that of having made the attempt...
...here Oakeshott himself cites Burke...
...as Nietzsche urged, the point in "digesting" the past is to free the will for creating a future...
...New York: Random House, 1956...
...Oakeshott also proposes another definition in an unpublished paper: politics is "activity and utterance connected with government and the instruments of government...
...it may "degenerate into superstition...
...85 Ibid...
...Even where healthy tradition is available, and even for those who already enjoy its benefits, there is something crucial missing from the picture: namely, genuine politics...
...Oakeshott traces the origins of this impulse in the modern world to Descartes and Bacon, stressing their simultaneous hostility to the authority of the past, and craving for a new certainty that resulted in the centrality of method in their thought...
...The trouble with the poor, to put the views of Aristotle, Arendt, and Oakeshott in a nutshell, is that they are hungry...
...there is nothing much you can do that will produce beneficial results...
...Thus, insofar as Oakeshott discusses causes here, the threat to traditionalism came from the outsiders, not from any fault in the tradition...
...142 The small child, though it does not yet (fully) know the substantive content of the rules, practices, institutions that surround it, regards them as timeless...
...Like the mass of ordinary people, school children do not have "anything significant to say," nor any reliable judgment about what is important to them...
...and much of what was introduced in the previous section as characterizing political conservatism is also, or excusively, treated by him as definitive of all politics.30 Moreover, he emphasizes that the definition is not intended as hortatory, but "as a description of what political activity actually is...
...Reason does have a useful role in relation to a healthy tradition: the role of occasional critic and resolver of inconsistencies...
...For some, like Tocqueville, this is obviously true...
...122 Ibid., p. 196...
...the pursuit of intimations is an art and requires a humanistic and concretely historical education...
...the appropriate role for government is "not the management of an enterprise," but the coordination "of those engaged in a great diversity of self-chosen enterprises...
...having remembered and acknowledged it he can then be really through with it and free of it, though it continues in him...
...Michael Oakeshott, "Contemporary British Politics," Cambridge Journal, 1 (May 1948) : 474-490, at 475...
...56, 57...
...Yet not all societies are equally continuous and coherent, not all ecosystems in natural balance...
...190, 49...
...politics had been precisely the realm from which "everything merely necessary or useful" was "strictly excluded," where "no activity that served only the purpose of making a living, of sustain 93 Burke, "Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe," in Stanlis, op...
...In an im 1311 Burke, Reflections, pp...
...63 Oakeshott, Rationalism, p. 124...
...29, 75...
...But for a political community, the pursuit of ideals has as its penalty "a chaos of conflicting ideals, the disruption of a common life...
...86 Ibid., p. 45...
...it is a policy position, chosen as freely or unfreely as any other, and in this case by men who themselves ate regularly...
...That is why Oakeshott would agree with Burke that "neither the few nor the many," neither rulers nor ruled may act politically on the basis of will...
...Note also the interesting consequence that the attempt to be Rationalistic results in "empiricism...
...Or rather, recalling his example of women's suffrage enacted to complete a pattern already formed in most other respects, the doctrine holds out great hope for those minorities already privileged in most respects but excluded from a particular right...
...Or else, he can adopt a Hegelian manner of argument, proposing his own teaching as a higher synthesis that rejects but also incorporates both Rationalism and its opponent...
...Even Burke, whose vision was so much like Oakeshott's, saw more clearly with respect to empire, even if not clearly enough...
...172-173...
...this he does, for example, in the essay on "Political Education...
...THE ROOTS OF CONSERVATISM 519 your parents...
...that stresses mutuality, the need for a public arena, the importance of limits...
...IVOakeshott's conception of politics is profoundly influenced, it seems to me, by his distrust of the "politics of the felt need," his sense that passion, need, will, constitute dangerous threats to civility...
...Society and individual 2 Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics (New York: Basic Books, 1962...
...But tradition, as Oakeshott pictures it, never fails to work...
...Once you begin to question authority, you undermine the "wise prejudices" and "pleasing illusions" that sustain civilization...
...Oakeshott is not wrong about that...
...125 Oakeshott, "Contemporary British Politics," p. 486...
...118 In sum, Oakeshott joins the other theorists of this tradition in offering a vision of politics that is nonutilitarian...
...the acceptance of our particular history, our particular community, our particular, concrete, historical circumstances as our own...
...Specifying this sort of demarcation between "what is to be done," and what is a "providential fact" that sets limits on our possibilities, has always been one of the great tasks undertaken by political theory...
...As Burke suggested, we are to regard those institutions as if they were our parents, our masters to whom we are apprenticed...
...But it is also a source of the new self, and this aspect he totally neglects...
...it only breaks down, or ends...
...What Aristotle and Tocqueville, Arendt and Oakeshott really fear and oppose in politics is a short-sightedly utilitarian, narrowly selfish, crassly competitive orientation...
...122 Healthy political activity is "repair," the appropriate normal attitude toward politics is one of "indifference...
...cit., p. 662...
...146 Using Wood's words we might say that such a person is so busy 145 Oakeshott, Rationalism, p. 114...
...In general, Oakeshott means by Rationalism the attempt to reject the authority of all tradition, custom, prejudice, habit, or inherited convention...
...Oakeshott does not teach us how to create a traditional society...
...S7 Ibid., pp...
...poverty was made into a political— that is, an actionable—issue...
...and at least he does not add insult to our injury by claiming that society has always looked and must always look like this...
...and of the causes of Rationalism Oakeshott tells us relatively little...
...104 It is not physical hunger but the spiritual hunger of the Protestant Ethic, of the acquisitive self, of status anxiety in the face of an unpredictable market...
...25, 29, 34...
...What we perceive as natural and necessary, we will not act to change...
...The Rationalist seeks the certain and orderly, the logically neat and simple, the abstract, the quantitative, the technical, the efficient, the unambiguous, what can be made explicit and laid out systematically...
...53 Both psychologically and structurally it becomes impossible to pursue justice or the public good...
...and Oakeshott must prove the superiority of conservatism in practical (historical and contingent) terms...
...London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1964), pp...
...See Philip E. Slater, The Glory of Hera (Boston: Beacon, 1968) and the psychological references cited therein...
...71 There are difficulties about "translating" the original, charismatic spiritual experience "into a form in which it could be appreciated by those who had never shared the original inspiration...
...Out of this profound vision of the nature of what Marx called human "species life," there evolves the central theme running through almost all of Oakeshott's later writings, a theme that he uses like a great searchlight, turning it to illuminate first one and then another realm of human activity...
...5 Though Oakeshott may not have the cure for our modern condition, he di 5 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, Thomas H. D. Mahoney, ed...
...Maturity means becoming a "master" rather than either an apprentice or a trained technician...
...57 Ibid., p. 5. 5a And Aristotle emphatically did not mean going beyond a minimally nutritional diet to two color television sets...
...for Machiavelli, Heaven can offer no greater opportunity for glory than the founding of a new polity or the revivification of one that has decayed into corruption...
...it can't be the cure...
...and as such persons generally have felt most of it, and are not of an overly-lively sensibility, they are the best judges of it...
...Politics requires a transition from the "assertive" to the "claiming mood," as Joseph Tussman has put it, from "I want" to "I am entitled to...
...Scientific Politics," p. 350...
...but only active par ticipation in collective decisions about what the community was to do and be could en large the narrow and private self, make hu man beings fully aware of their capacity to choose and their nonimmediate connections to others...
...we become the particular persons we do become by internalizing the language, cultural norms, habits of behavior in the midst of which we are born...
...politics is peripheral to the communal, significant life of the society, and is useful only for occasional repairs...
...It "entered the public realm" in the "disguise of an organization of property-owners" who, instead of claiming access to the traditional values of political participation, sought 101 Arendt, Human Condition, p. 195...
...on the contrary, like Plato, he is so much aware and afraid of them that he cannot conceive of any way in which mere human beings could hope to control them...
...Oakeshott's image of selfhood is one in which the ego is relatively weak, and only a severe superego keeps passion in check...
...9 2 Ibid., P. 248...
...1211 In politics, therefore, we must be "unadventurous," must never "buckle on armour and seek dragons to slay," and and should have no love for "what is dangerous and difficult...
...Tradition can be active without any of the problems of action...
...and a different sort that he calls "practical," and "know-how," the knowledge of experience rather than reflection, that exists "only in use...
...bility and coherence for their own sakes, he also regards them as instrumental toward achieving some other, perhaps ' more widely shared political goals...
...58 Like Burke, Oakeshott believes that in the absence of traditional restraints, human beings are creatures of passion and impulse, and politics becomes a chaos of conflicting wills...
...Sometimes, in his best moments, Oakeshott seems to see this...
...If the present is arid, offering little or nothing to be used or enjoyed, then this inclination will be weak or absent...
...Here and elsewhere I find strong parallels between Oakeshott and Burke...
...98 But in the French Revolution, Arendt argues, this multitude of the poor and oppressed, traditionally excluded from the public realm and kept "hidden in darkness and shame," began for the first time "to doubt that poverty is inherent in the human condition," began, that is, to regard their needs as a political issue...
...So Tocqueville strives to hold a delicate balance, avoiding the preaching of a civic duty empty of any real, personal meaning, and the pessimistic constitutionalism of, say, a James Madison which attempts to harness narrowly selfish men to an institutional machine that will produce the public good despite their intentions and without changing their character...
...Such a people is as helpless with its new paper constitution or new institutional system as a layman ignorant of mathematics is with a correct mathematical formula...
...Third, do not hope to find answers in any abstract principle, but immerse yourself in concrete knowledge of your community...
...Oakeshott correctly refuses to equate politics with the efficient administration of things, with the acquisitive utilitarian bargaining of "rational economic man," with the domination of masters imposed upon slaves by naked force...
...But though Oakeshott rejects an "organic" view of society, he shares the organicist's anxiety about planned, largescale social change.3 Whenever we deliberately introduce some new policy or institution, we, as it were, upset the ecological balance of the system in ways we cannot control or foresee...
...treated government like a private business, each member thinking of public affairs only in so far as they could be turned to his private profit," until the government "took on the features of a trading company...
...we are our traditions...
...61 ff...
...Of course there is a sense in which there are always traditions, humans being culture-animals...
...Freedom is the absence of such interference...
...But though apprenticeship is meant to contrast with such training, to produce people capable of creating and criticizing independently, yet there is no place in Oakeshott's world for people with this capacity...
...89 Ibid., pp...
...16 Ibid...
...94 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking, 1965), p. 54...
...100, 108...
...97 They "burst onto the scene" of history for the first time as a political force, introducing into politics the very element of physical appetite, of economic necessity, previously considered antithetical to it...
...Such a picture is not inaccurate about certain kinds of human endeavor, about language or about art...
...THE ROOTS OF CONSERVATISM 505 quires a modicum of trust and stability in the first place...
...22, 29...
...VII In the end, Oakeshott misses or denies what is distinctive about politics, and this failure accounts for most of what is problematic in his thought...
...154 Crick, op...
...68 Oakeshott also calls this political style "the politics of the felt need," for it makes no allowance for needs existing but not yet felt, or not yet articulated, or not yet organized, for the needs of the future or of the powerless, or for goals that transcend need...
...the only reliable restraint on power is habits of conduct...
...But he does want to assimilate politics to the habitual drift of a society or culture that is full of private, piecemeal activity but passive at the collective level and in which no one takes responsibility for the whole...
...Oakeshott's political theory rests in reality on the implicit recommendation that we minimize politics as much as possible— ideally that we eliminate it altogether or conduct it in a nonpolitical way, like culture, language, and art...
...79 See the section on Burke's role and views on the impeachment of Warren Hastings, in Stanlis, op...
...Indeed, the point is the process, not the conclusion...
...Oakeshott would be disturbed, but one doubts if he could help us much...
...One suspects that her animus against Marxist totalitarianism may account for some of the discrepancies...
...lle It does not matter that in our private-social activities we are not conscious of their public significance, of alternative choices, of our responsibility for public consequences...
...And Oakeshott is in the end unable to give any account of how a tradition, once created, might be preserved or protected under attack...
...Oakeshott's doctrine obviously has quite similar limitations from the point of view of any oppressed minority in a country that does have a tradition of liberty...
...yet it is he who stresses the educational nature of political participation itself, the extent to which only that activity can fully develop human potential...
...Short of divine intervention, everything created or invented by human beings must spring from their minds, and thereby from their past experience...
...134 But implicit in such expressions clearly is the assumption that civilization depends upon illusions, not on real benefits...
...but all of them also see it as hitherto restricted in membership, with access reserved to a propertied elite...
...86 Ibid., p. 136...
...as well as the work of Melanie Klein...
...292, 295 (thus actually twice...
...75 Ibid...
...15 So he construes political life as the opportunity for "imposing upon" the citizenry his vision of order, "a vision of human activity co-ordinated and set going in a single direction...
...3, 9-18, 35, 107-113, 118-120,300-303...
...Oakeshott's answers to this question are multiple and sometimes difficult to interpret...
...If philosophy is concerned with questioning the deep necessities of our lives, it must necessarily HANNA FENICHEL PITKIN end in their acceptance, and be retrospective...
...68-94 passim...
...136 Thus the conservative is one who is "strongly disposed to preserve his identity...
...Being rational in science, for instance, will be quite different from being rational in moral conduct...
...But note how sensitively Oakeshott treats precisely this issue in relation to poetry...
...The total change is always more extensive than the change desired," and there is always danger that the harmful by-products may outweigh the intended benefit...
...It does not seem possible to him that the results of such political freedom might ultimately be stronger than any unexamined inheritance...
...125, 133...
...There is thus an identifiable and pernicious style in politics that results from believing in the false doctrine of Rationalism...
...94 Traditionally, from its invention in the Greek polis, free political life had presupposed the prior mastering of economic necessity...
...But this cannot be achieved without the engagement of lived experience, of genuine needs, of passion...
...304, 311, 129, 41, 43...
...As it grows older it learns not only the substantive content of its civilization, but also about how rules and practices are established and can be changed by human beings in historical time, human beings like its parents and itself...
...98 Arendt, On Revolution, p. 41...
...the lives of most men do not revolve around a felt necessity to speak...
...108 Thus, in the end, as she remarks in a casual parenthesis, "to have a society of laborers, it is of course not necessary that every member actually be a laborer or a worker...
...It produces technicians who can apply but not create, who are good at efficient means but do not question goals...
...Garden City: Doubleday, 1955), p. 169...
...Economic issues have always appeared in the political realm—even, or especially, in the Greek polls...
...That is why Oakeshott fails to see that what a "resident magistrate" can symbolize to a colonized people depends on the lived realities of what he does and of the context in which he operates...
...16 His guide is not history or any tradition of past thought or practice, but what Oakeshott calls "ideology," an abstract principle or set of principles purporting to be independently premeditated...
...144 Wood, op...
...123 Ibid., pp...
...But in the end the two conservatisms share some fundamental weaknesses...
...22 Oakeshott, Rationalism, p. 91...
...Together, these concerns make up much of what is valuable, but usually ignored, in Oakeshott's political theory...
...Even on such "exceptional" occasions, real Rationalistic politics, real innovation is a logical impossibility...
...35 Acting in accord with the Rationalistic model is impossible, acting on it, unfortunately, is not...
...88 Oakeshott, Rationalism, p. 31...
...New York: Collier, 1962...
...146-147...
...and morality correspond also to two con ceptions of education...
...Such views are, indeed, reminiscent of a tradition of political thought stemming at least from Aristotle and revived most recently by Arendt, that is concerned to protect the autonomy of politics from the onslaught of excluded social strata...
...they come to us out of a tradition that we cannot fathom and should not question...
...62 But aside from this confusion, Oakeshott is clearly aware that the traditions in our tradition are always "at once coherent and incoherent...
...capable of adaptation than is Rationalism, Oakeshott acknowledges that this adaptation only works when change is limited and slow...
...Rationalistic knowl edge, whether of science, moral principles, law, or cooking, can be imparted directly and explicitly by telling it to the student...
...1311 Ibid., p. 66...
...the id is not a viable, individuated, developed person at all...
...A society may pursue many specific goals, but for Oakeshott it is always "more important for a society to move together than for it to move either fast or far...
...18 Ibid., pp...
...3 Oakeshott, Rationalism, p. 183...
...Successful sublimation, however, a psyche organized around a strong ego, defies the kind of dichotomization that Oakeshott assumes...
...On Revolution, p. 54...
...Change is a threat to identity," Oakeshott says, "and every change is an emblem of extinction...
...He might point out that all this is only to be expected in a nation founded in "a specific and express rejection of tradition...
...The supposed dominion of biological need that makes people unfree and certain questions unsuitable to politics is in reality al 104 Arendt, Human Condition, p. 60...
...For Aristotle as for Arendt, the prepolitical and essentially violent act of founding necessarily underlies the life of any polis...
...Reading Oakeshott in America today is a fascinating and ironic experience...
...Oakeshott stresses that a conversation is not an argument: the relations in a conversation "are not those of assertion and denial but...
...New York: Random House, 1969), pp...
...sacrifice...
...92 The real needs of those who are pressed by necessity but are not fit to converse politically must of course be attended to, but not by their own political activity...
...Oakeshott in effect sees only the repressive superego and rebellious id...
...One need not warn against what is impossible...
...70-71...
...Yet it is surely obvious that action will be more likely to succeed where we know accurately what is necessary and what subject to our choice...
...Success is "sporadic and uncertain, something which has to be achieved lib "Wherever you go, you will be a polis," the Greeks said to the colonists they sent out...
...3 s Ibid., p. 127...
...of acknowledgment and accommodation," of "oblique recognition...
...For him, politics is and healthy politics must be a "secondary activity," of what our newspapers would today call "low profile...
...He clearly recognizes that Rationalism itself has a history and has now become a tradition: in morality, one by which "we are for the most part dominated...
...One must be content with partial and limited, which is to say, with human achievements...
...they are in fact like newcomers in any enterprise who must learn doctrine abstractly, like a foreign language from a grammar...
...Rather, the problem seems to be that for most people in the modern world, the ideal is simply irrelevant...
...139 Accordingly, when Oakeshott considers primary and secondary education—"school education," as he calls it—his attitude toward the children is much like his political attitude toward the mass of the citizenry...
...141 But note that Oakeshott disclaims any presupposition of natural human depravity...
...225, 229...
...It is true, as Samuel Coleman points out, that Oakeshott moves ambiguously between using "tradition" to mean the entire cultural inheritance of a society, and using it to mean a particular strand in that inheritance—say, the tradition of the rule of law, or of habeas corpus—which may have implications that conflict with those of other particular traditions...
...Thus, while he lauds the tenacious adaptability of healthy tradition, he is also able to see—particularly in nonpolitical contexts—its cardinal weakness: the tendency to ossification...
...82 Thus, says Oake 82 Ibid., p. 22...
...As Tocqueville said, "the man who asks of freedom anything other than itself is born to be a slave...
...89 Yet in the end he always opts for private property as "the institution of property most favourable to liberty, .. . for it is by this means only that the maximum diffusion of the power that springs from ownership may be achieved...
...except for the duty of voting at elections, most people are not and should not be engaged in politics proper...
...we are never to see our own responsibility, our own choice in relation to those institutions...
...He prefers existing practice to the abstract imported idea...
...Oakeshott, of course, does not talk of parricide...
...No wonder he thinks that those with strident demands would have "nothing to say" in such a conversation...
...All L is a number of commentators have noted, an ambiguity runs through Oakeshott's treatment of this central theme of dichotomization: it seems that he cannot decide whether the Rationalism he opposes is impossible, so that we in fact cannot act Rationalistically in politics, morals, education...
...1 J. W. Grove, "Preface," to W. H. Greenleaf, Oakeshott's Philosophical Politics (London: Longmans, Green, 1966...
...55 Oakeshott, Rationalism, p. 116...
...40 Freedom, like a recipe for game pie, is not a bright idea...
...But surely one logical consequence of taking this position about thought and change is that radicalism no longer constitutes any sort of danger...
...Why should anyone but a misanthrope 80 Burke, "Appeal," in Stanlis, op...
...And traditions are liable to change in this respect, either because of their own internal drift, or because of a failure to adapt to changed social conditions...
...14 In politics the Rationalist's distrust of all inherited traditional arrangements seeks expression in action...
...and the character of those differences is crucial...
...It is an activity therefore, suitable for individuals, but not for societies.' 126 Oakeshott does speak of "deliberation" once, in Michael Oakeshott, "Political Laws and Captive Audiences," in Talking to Eastern Europe, G. R. Urban, ed...
...or merely undesirable, so that there is a real danger that we might do so...
...123 Its task is not "to make men good or even better...
...Oakeshott notes that even traditional institutions are subject to a kind of inertial drift that may totally alter their impact...
...pect further privileges from it...
...152 But politics proper, the conscious, deliberate, and collective pursuit of public goals is to be kept minimal, remedial, limited...
...Oakeshott's vision is one in which people have more valuable things to do with their time than this useful but unattractive "attending to arrangements...
...152 Oakeshott, "Claims of Politics," pp...
...But no such hope is held out to those who presently lack all status in the society...
...129 Ibid., pp...
...What he never even considers as an alternative, is a vision in which "we" might actively and collectively govern ourselves, in which politics might be the concern of an entire, self-consciously engaged community, and freedom might consist in shared self-governing rather than protected privacy...
...The change tradition "admits is neither great nor sudden," Oakeshott says...
...124, 133 136...
...Who but a theorist cares about an incorrect interpretation...
...Michael Oakeshott, "The Universities," Cambridge Journal, 2 (June 1949): 515-542, at 542...
...he will not have recourse to natural law or divine purpose or any such "particular beliefs about the universe, about the world in general, or about human conduct in general...
...119 Ibid., p. 41...
...for it was composed for the instruction of a less politically educated class than any other that has ever come to have the illusion of exercising political power...
...He is willing to reform or adjust them where that is necessary in order to keep them stable, but his manner of reform is always piecemeal and gradual, in ways consistent with the tradition...
...Oakeshott simply has nothing to say to people without a tradition to preserve...
...For only tradition and the slow, gradual accretion of habit can generate or protect freedom...
...27 Oakeshott, Rationalism, p. 120...
...p. 73...
...Oakeshott is not trying to save politics from petty purposes in order to free it (or us) for great ones...
...In attacking political Rationalism, Oakeshott charges that it suffers from a "rigidity and fixity of character" which leaves it "without the power to correct its own short-comings...
...nor does he deny the realities of economic organization in modern society...
...60 Clearly what he means is that only tradition makes it possible to coordinate people's short-range, conflicting goals into a long-range public good...
...But even Oakeshott recognizes that not every tradition in that sense is an idyll worthy of conservation...
...Those who govern never need to exercise much power, for the small and partial actions they take are scarcely noticed by the governed...
...At other times, Rationalism and its opponent are seen as two abstractions from a single concrete reality that must necessarily always contain both aspects...
...31 Oakeshott himself raises the question whether his manner of defining politics may not confuse "what is, perhaps, normal" in that realm with "what is necessary," whether it might not ignore "important exceptions" like the Norman Conquest of England or the Russian Revolution...
...524 HANNA FENICHEL PITKIN at stake, collectively and for each participant...
...Oakeshott, Rationalism, p. 121...
...It urges the admission into politics of previously excluded strata...
...506 HANNA FENICHEL PITKIN hundred years...
...And it is as vain in politics as in any other human activity, to hope for some sort of "mistake-proof manner of deciding what should be done...
...For, as both Freud and Nietzsche saw, someone who rejects his past (rejects it, that is, in the wrong way, denies and represses it) remains its captive...
...one can stress the 29 Oakeshott, Rationalism, p. 112...
Vol. 20 • September 1973 • No. 4
