MICHAEL OAKESHOTT: The Anti-Rationalist

MICHAEL OAKESHOTT’s book Rationalism in Politics was a long time in the making. It grew from several essays Oakeshott wrote in the 1940s for The Cambridge Journal, which he was editing at the time. Other essays (including the famous 1951 lecture inaugurating his chairmanship at the London School of Economics) were added to compose the book that first appeared in 1962. But Oakeshott was always rather insouciant about which of his writings turned up in print and which didn’t. One on obvious candidate was an essay called “The Masses in Representative Democracy.” Why, I once asked him, was that essay not included? “I just forgot,” he said. That is why we can accept as the definitive version only the augmented collection edited by Timothy Fuller for Liberty Fund. It came out in 1991, just after the author’s death.

Oakeshott’s interpretation of rationalism changed the landscape of Western thought on politics, but it certainly hasn’t stopped rationalism in its tracks, nor did Oakeshott imagine that it would. What he called “rationalism” was any political project based on some abstract doctrine that purported to apply to human beings as such. Take Jefferson’s famous remark about the self-evident character of the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness: It is both the foundation of American civilization, and also complete nonsense. Even in its own time, it hardly referred to much south of the Mason-Dixon line. If you had in those days used it as a conversational gambit with a Chinese mandarin, a Hindu, a tribesman in the Sahara, or anyone else outside one particular area of Western Christendom, you would have been thought deranged. That is still pretty much true. Consider the problem America and its allies have in bringing the Western thing called “democracy” to Iraq.

KM

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Kenneth Minogue

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MICHAEL OAKESHOTT’s book Rationalism in Politics was a long time in the making. It grew from several essays Oakeshott wrote in the 1940s for The Cambridge Journal, which he was editing at the time. Other essays (including the famous 1951 lecture inaugurating his chairmanship at the London School of Economics) were added to compose the book that first appeared in 1962. But Oakeshott was always rather insouciant about which of his writings turned up in print and which didn’t. One on obvious candidate was an essay called “The Masses in Representative Democracy.” Why, I once asked him, was that essay not included? “I just forgot,” he said. That is why we can accept as the definitive version only the augmented collection edited by Timothy Fuller for Liberty Fund. It came out in 1991, just after the author’s death.

Oakeshott’s interpretation of rationalism changed the landscape of Western thought on politics, but it certainly hasn’t stopped rationalism in its tracks, nor did Oakeshott imagine that it would. What he called “rationalism” was any political project based on some abstract doctrine that purported to apply to human beings as such. Take Jefferson’s famous remark about the self-evident character of the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness: It is both the foundation of American civilization, and also complete nonsense. Even in its own time, it hardly referred to much south of the Mason-Dixon line. If you had in those days used it as a conversational gambit with a Chinese mandarin, a Hindu, a tribesman in the Sahara, or anyone else outside one particular area of Western Christendom, you would have been thought deranged. That is still pretty much true. Consider the problem America and its allies have in bringing the Western thing called “democracy” to Iraq.