Oakeshott's concept of ideology

Abstract

Michael Oakeshott's critique of ‘political rationalism’ is often regarded as a unique contribution to the study of 20th-century ‘ideologies.’ But, in fact, Oakeshott understood rationalism and ideology as distinct phenomena. This article exposes the essence of each in Oakeshott's writings, analyses their complex relationship and shows how far back in human history they reached. Neither was, for Oakeshott, distinctly modern. In fact, he traced ideology and rationalism alike to the birth of philosophy in ancient Greece, even while he acknowledged important differences in their ancient and modern manifestations. Oakeshott's outlook with respect to these phenomena was significantly more pessimistic than that of other 20th-century analysts. He did not think our problems were easily curable. He did, however, harbour some hope (albeit dreamy) that in the domain of politics in particular, the metaphor of ‘conversation’ might somehow loosen the grip of ideological thought and action.

Notes

^1. On the purported end of ideology, see D. Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion or Political Ideas in the Fifties (Glencoe: Free Press, 1960); see also Eric Voegelin, ‘Liberalism and its history’, Review of Politics, 36(4) (1974), pp. 504–520.

^2. On the continued usefulness of ideology as an analytical concept, despite its contested range of meanings, see M. Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); Ideology: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

^3. M. Seliger, Ideology and Politics (New York: Free Press, 1976), p. 31, equates Oakeshott's concept of ideology with his critique of rationalism. H. Williams, Concepts of Ideology (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988), pp. 41–47, equates it with Oakeshott's distinction between ‘practice’ and ‘philosophy,’ which is yet something different. Important exceptions include P. Franco, Michael Oakeshott: An Introduction (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004); T. Nardin, The Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001); and R. Grant, Oakeshott (London: Claridge Press, 1990).

^4. J. M. Robertson, a Liberal member of British Parliament from 1906 to 1918, presented ‘rationalism’ in its most positive light in his seminal Short History of Free Thought, Ancient and Modern (New York: Macmillan, 1899). In the religious domain, rationalism had advocates such as A. W. Benn, The History of English Rationalism in the Nineteenth Century, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, 1906), and critics such as G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1908). Accounts of rationalism's significant role in European political history appeared in G. de Ruggiero, The History of European Liberalism, trans., R. G. Collingwood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1927), and H. Laski, The Rise of European Liberalism (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1936). Oakeshott's critique of rationalism first appeared in ‘Rationalism in politics’, The Cambridge Journal, I, pp. 81–98, 145–157 (1947–1948), and was later republished in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1962).

^5. For Oakeshott's rough appropriation of Weberian ideal typology, see his discussion of ‘identification’ and ‘ideal characters’ in On Human Conduct (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 3–6.

^6. Oakeshott, ‘Rationalism in politics’, in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund Press, 1991), p. 7. All quotations from Rationalism in Politics refer to this edition, not to the edition from 1962.

^7. L. O'Sullivan (Ed.), Michael Oakeshott: Early Political Writings (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2010), p. 3.

^8. O'Sullivan, ibid., p. 5.

^9. O'Sullivan, ibid., p. 2.

^10. Grant, op. cit., Ref. 3, pp. 25–30.

^11. Grant, ibid., p. 6.

^12. See, e.g. E. Voegelin, The New Science of Politics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1952); Science, Politics and Gnosticism (Chicago, IL: Henry Regnery, 1968).

^13. Oakeshott, ‘Rationalism in politics’, op. cit., Ref. 6, pp. 7, 8, 23 (italics added).

^14. See O'Sullivan, op. cit., Ref. 7, pp. 2–3.

^15. See Oakeshott, Experience and its Modes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933). For a later variant of this insight, see his essay ‘The voice of poetry in the conversation of mankind’, in Rationalism, op. cit., Ref. 6, pp. 488–541. An excellent treatment of Oakeshott on modality is Nardin, op.cit., Ref. 3, chapter 1.

^16. Oakeshott, ‘Rationalism in politics’, op. cit., Ref. 6, p. 16.

^17. Oakeshott, ibid., p. 15.

^18. Ludwig von Mises, Liberalismus (Jena: Verlag von Gustav Fischer, 1927), p. 6: ‘Political problems are problems of social engineering, and their solution must be tried in the same way and by the same means that are available to us in solving other technical tasks, through rational reflection and exploration of the given conditions. Everything man is and what elevates him above the animal, he owes to reason. Why should he only in politics forgo the use of reason and trust in dark and unclear feelings and impulses?’

^19. Space does not permit quotation from von Mises' positive embrace of rationalism in section three of his introduction to Liberalismus (ibid., pp. 5–6), but readers may refer to those pages as further illustration of what Oakeshott meant by the rationalist temper in politics.

^20. Oakeshott, ‘Rationalism in politics’, op. cit., Ref. 6, p. 22.

^21. Oakeshott, ibid.

^22. Oakeshott, ibid., pp. 17–18.

^23. Oakeshott, ibid., p. 18. Elsewhere he would stress the religious element. See especially, Oakeshott, ‘The voice of conversation in the education of mankind’, in L. O'Sullivan (Ed.) What Is History and Other Essays (Exeter: Imprint Academics, 2004), p. 195, where he traces rationalism back to the ‘unholy rage to reform,’ thus back to 16th-century religion rather than to 17th-century philosophy.

^24. Oakeshott, ‘Rationalism in politics’, op. cit., Ref. 6., p. 22.

^25. See, e.g. Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, op. cit., Ref. 12, chapters 4–6. This is not meant as a dismissal of Voegelin's work. On the contrary, because ideology is so Protean in character, it allows for (even requires) different angles of analysis, and no one has done more than Voegelin to expose its spiritual aspect—the ways in which it emerges from a spiritual revolt against the human condition as it is given. But there are other dimensions to explore beyond the spiritual.

^26. Oakeshott, ‘Rationalism in politics’, op. cit., Ref. 6, p. 9.

^27. Oakeshott, ibid.

^28. Oakeshott, ibid.

^29. Oakeshott, ibid., p. 10. I. Berlin offers a strikingly similar critique of the politics of uniformity in his ‘Two concepts of liberty’, in Henry Hardy (Ed.) Isaiah Berlin: Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 199: ‘If I am a legislator or ruler, I must assume that if the law I impose is rational (and I can consult only my own reason) it will automatically be approved by all the members of my society so far as they are rational beings. For if they disapprove, they must, pro tanto, be irrational.’ The subsection of Berlin's essay called ‘The temple of Sarastro’ (pp. 191–200) reads as a sustained meditation on Oakeshott's conception of rationalism and the politics of uniformity. Delivered in 1958, the lecture which formed the basis of Berlin's essay could have easily been influenced by Oakeshott's essay on rationalism, which first appeared in 1947.

^30. See O'Sullivan, op. cit., Ref 7, p. 113; Oakeshott is referring to Spinoza's Ethics, Bk 4, prop. xxxv. In his introduction, O'Sullivan p. 30, marks a relevant shift in Oakeshott's thinking about the state. In the 1920s he conceived the state as resting on ‘solidarity of feeling, opinion and belief,’ whereas his view in On Human Conduct is that it rests on mere agreement about the authority of law.

^31. G. Santayana, ‘The ironies of liberalism’, in Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (New York: Scribner's, 1922), p. 181.

^32. Antoine Louis Destutt de Tracy, Élémens d'idéologie (Paris: Courcier, 1815–1818); for an analysis of which, see E. Kennedy, A Philosophe in the Age of Revolution:Destutt de Tracy and the Origins of ‘Ideology’ (Philadelphia, PA: American Philosophical Society, 1978).

^33. See especially Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Die Deutsche Ideologie, written in 1846 but not published until the 20th century. A classic but still valuable analysis of Marx's concept of ideology is P. Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, G. H. Taylor (Ed.) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 21–102; see also T. Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso, 1991), pp. 70–91.

^34. For Voegelin's analysis of ideology in terms of spiritual ‘disease’ and ‘revolt,’ see, e.g. Israel and Revelation, in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol. 14 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995–2006), p. 24; see also ‘Wisdom and the magic of the extreme’, in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol. 12, p. 322.

^35. Oakeshott, ‘Rationalism in politics’, op. cit., Ref. 6, p. 41.

^36. Oakeshott, ‘Political education’ in Rationalism, op. cit., Ref. 6, p. 55.

^37. Oakeshott, ibid., p. 58. For a slightly more expansive statement of the usefulness of ideologies in ethics and politics, see Oakeshott, ‘Conduct and ideology in politics’, in O'Sullivan (Ed.), op. cit., Ref. 23, p. 254.

^38. Oakeshott, ‘Rationalism in politics’, op. cit., Ref. 6, p. 14, n. 8, my italics.

^39. Oakeshott, ibid., p. 8; cf. Oakeshott, ‘The Tower of Babel’, in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, op. cit., Ref. 6, pp. 484–485, where he briefly sketches out the process by which Christianity became an ideology in the third century.

^40. Oakeshott, ‘Rationalism in politics’, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, op. cit., Ref. 6, p. 41. A. MacIntyre, whose account of ‘practices’ in After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984) echoes Oakeshott's discussion of ‘practical knowledge’ and ‘tradition,’ takes a similar view of the dependence of moral virtues on the traditions from which they emerge; see pp. 1–5, 187–203, 210–211, 256–263.

^41. Oakeshott, ‘Rationalism in politics’, op. cit., Ref. 6, p. 11.

^42. Evidence for this appears in a letter Oakeshott wrote to Karl Popper in 1948, explaining his understanding of rationalism. There he refers to a ‘modified version of Utopianism which picks at one problem of society at a given moment and is prepared to upset the whole of the society in order to get that one problem solved.’ The letter is reprinted in S. Jacobs and I. Tregenza, ‘Rationalism and tradition: the Popper-Oakeshott exchange’, European Journal of Political Theory, 13(1) (2014), pp. 3–24.

^43. See Oakeshott, ‘Political discourse’, in Rationalism, op. cit., Ref. 6, pp. 78–81; readers of Hannah Arendt will recall that she treats this problem as one of the potentially paralyzing risks of political action in The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 236–248.

^44. Oakeshott, ‘Political education’, op. cit., Ref. 6, p. 48.

^45. Oakeshott, ibid., p. 51.

^46. Franco, op. cit., Ref. 3, pp. 85–92, is excellent on this point; see especially p. 91: ‘Ideological politics are not simply undesirable; they are strictly speaking impossible.’

^47. Freeden, op. cit., Ref. 2, p. 322.

^48. Grant, op. cit., Ref. 3, pp. 55–56.

^49. Grant, ibid., p. 12.

^50. Consider the following passages from Oakeshott, ‘Rationalism in politics’, op. cit., Ref. 6, pp. 9, 16, 26 (my italics):

	[The Rationalist] always prefers the invention of a new device to making use of a current and well-tried expedient … This is aptly illustrated by the Rationalist's attitude towards a tradition of ideas. There is, of course, no question either of retaining or improving such a tradition, for both these involve an attitude of submission. It must be destroyed. And to fill its place the Rationalist puts something of his own making—an ideology.
	The heart of the matter is the pre-occupation of the Rationalist with certainty … For example, the superiority of an ideology over a tradition of thought lies in its appearance of being self-contained.
	How deeply the Rationalist disposition of mind has invaded our political thought and practice is illustrated by the extent to which traditions of behavior have given place to ideologies, the extent to which the politics of destruction and creation have been substituted for the politics of repair, the consciously planned and deliberately executed being considered (for that reason) better than what has grown up and established itself unselfconsciously over a period of time.

^51. As for instance in G. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, [1920] 1971).

^52. Cf. Nardin, op. cit., Ref. 3, p. 132; and A. Botwinick, Michael Oakeshott's Skepticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), p. 121.

^53. Cf. Franco, op. cit., Ref. 3, p. 86, who observes that Oakeshott's treatment of rationalism is ‘curiously truncated and uncomplicated.’

^54. Oakeshott, ‘Political education’, op. cit., Ref. 6, p. 58.

^55. Oakeshott's comparison of rationalism's emergence to that of various architectural styles supports this claim. ‘Gothic’ is not just a style, but a tradition. So too with rationalism. See Oakeshott, ‘Rationalism in politics’, op. cit., Ref. 6, pp. 17–18; and cf. ‘Conduct and ideology in politics’, op. cit., Ref. 37, pp. 252–253.

^56. For example, Marx and Engels—whom Oakeshott calls ‘the authors of the most stupendous of our political rationalisms’—came by their disposition less through the written teachings of thinkers like Hegel and Feuerbach than by apprenticing under Bruno Bauer, the charismatic Young Hegelian. And though they eventually broke with Bauer (just as they broke from the idealism of Hegel and Feuerbach) the teacher's impact lingered on. One cannot break with a teacher as easily as one breaks with a teaching.

^57. Oakeshott, ‘Rationalism in politics’, op. cit., Ref. 6, p. 34.

^58. Oakeshott, Ibid., p. 16.

^59. In his private notebooks from the period, he writes: ‘Rationalism. The project of turning the “public schools” into special boarding schools for children from broken[?] homes, in need of psychiatric attention, deprived children, etc. What the “rationalist” does not understand is that this is the complete destruction of “public schools”; he thinks of it as a useful adaptation. The public schools are a product of a certain sort of culture. Their distinctive virtues spring from a certain sort of education related to the children who come to them from a certain sort of home. These are counterparts of one another: the school would not exist with, at any rate, a dominant child of this sort.’ My copy of The Complete LSE Notebooks is a digital transcript prepared by Luke O'Sullivan and circulated privately. The entry appears on p. 78. Some excerpts from the Notebooks will appear in print later this year as L. O'Sullivan and R. Grant (Eds), Michael Oakeshott: Notebooks and Letters 1922–90 (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2014).

^60. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom (London: Routledge, [1944] 2001), which was a popular version of the second volume of his treatise, The Abuse and Decline of Reason, offered a trenchant critique of British collectivism and planning. Similarly, Popper's essay, ‘Utopia and violence’, The Hibbert Journal 16 (1948), pp. 109–116, reprinted in Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, 4th ed. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), distinguished between ‘true rationalism’, which Popper endorsed, and the ‘false rationalism’ of utopian collectivists. Popper sent an early version of this paper to Oakeshott at Cambridge, and they corresponded about the similarities and differences between their understandings of rationalism. See Jacobs and Tregenza, op. cit., Ref. 42.

^61. Oakeshott, ‘Rationalism in politics’, op. cit., Ref. 6, p. 5.

^62. Oakeshott, ibid., p. 26.

^63.The Road to Serfdom, op. cit., Ref. 60, is an effective critique of rationalism and uses the term itself in much the way Oakeshott would (see p. 220). Later, Hayek would offer a more explicit analysis of rationalism in The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1960), chapter 4.

^64. Oakeshott, ‘Rationalism in politics’, op. cit., Ref. 6, p. 31.

^65. For an excellent weighing of the rationalist and traditionalist interpretations of the American Revolution, see L. Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1955), pp. 47–50. Hartz's view was that the Americans were something virtually unrecognizable from the European perspective: a blend of traditionalism and rationalism: ‘Were they rationalists or were they traditionalists? The truth is, they were neither, which is perhaps another way of saying they were both.… Radicalism and conservatism have been twisted entirely out of shape by the liberal flow of American history.’

^66. Oakeshott, ‘Rationalism in politics’, op. cit., Ref. 6, p. 33; the passage is from John Jay's ‘Charge to the Grand Jury of Ulster County, September 9, 1777.’ Hayek also took exception to Oakeshott's interpretation of America's Founding. In his The Constitution of Liberty, pp. 473–474, Hayek countered Oakeshott's quotation from John Jay with one from John Dickinson: ‘Experience must be our only guide. Reason may mislead us. It was not Reason that discovered the singular and admirable mechanism of the English Constitution. It was not Reason that discovered … the odd and in the eye of those who are governed by reason, the absurd mode of trial by Jury. Accident probably produced these discoveries, and experience has given a sanction to them. This then is our guide.’

^67. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, op. cit., Ref. 63, p. 473, n. 33.

^68. Oakeshott, ‘Rationalism in politics’, op. cit., Ref. 6, p. 32.

^69. Oakeshott, ibid., p. 28

^70. Oakeshott, ibid., p. 30.

^71. Oakeshott, ibid., p. 32. Many Locke scholars (including myself) will disagree with this characterization of Locke's text, especially those who understand something of the way Locke's ideas changed over time in light of changed circumstances on the ground.

^72.Ibid., p. 18, my italics. In Oakeshott's notebooks, soon to be published by O'Sullivan, a brief entry reads: ‘There is a story, appended to the account of St Francis preaching to the Saracens, in which the Sultan, the King of Egypt, “asked him in secret to entreat God to reveal to him, by some miracle, which is the best religion”.’ ‘Rationalism’ did not begin with Descartes.

^73. Oakeshott, ‘The voice of conversation’, op. cit., Ref. 23, p. 195. This unpublished essay was written in or around 1948, thus during the same period as ‘Rationalism in politics,’ though perhaps a year or two later.

^74. Oakeshott, ‘The Tower of Babel’, op. cit., Ref. 39, p. 485.

^75. Oakeshott, ibid.

^76. Oakeshott, ‘Political discourse’, op. cit., Ref. 43, p. 82.

^77. See Oakeshott, ‘Rationalism in politics’, op. cit., Ref. 6, p. 20; ‘Political discourse’, op. cit., Ref. 6, pp. 82–85; On Human Conduct, op. cit., Ref. 5, pp. 27–31, 49; and Experience and its Modes, op. cit., Ref. 15, p. 321. See also G. Callahan, ‘Michael Oakeshott on rationalism in politics’, The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty (January/February 2009), p. 28; and D. Spitz, ‘A Rationalist Malgré Lui: The perplexities of being Michael Oakeshott’, Political Theory, 4(3) (1976): 335–352, especially pp. 335–337.

^78. Oakeshott, ‘Conduct and ideology in politics’, op. cit., Ref. 37, p. 249. In terms of O'Sullivan's thesis about Oakeshott's ‘self-critique,’ this passage seems to redress Oakeshott's own emphasis on definition from his early days of Idealism. See O'Sullivan, op. cit., Ref. 7, pp. 6–7.

^79. Oakeshott, ‘Conduct and ideology in politics’, op. cit., Ref. 37, p. 250.

^80. Oakeshott, ibid., p. 251.

^81. Oakeshott, ibid., p. 250.

^82. Oakeshott, ‘Political discourse’, op. cit., Ref. 43., pp. 82–83.

^83. See Eric Voegelin, ‘The origins of scientism’, in The Collected Works, Vol. 10, op. cit., Ref. 34, esp. p. 190; and ‘Immortality: experience and symbol’, in The Collected Works, Vol. 12, op. cit., Ref. 34, p. 75.

^84. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1951), p. 468. The historical and phenomenological approach towards a remedy is on display in, for instance, The Human Condition, op. cit., Ref. 43.

^85. Oakeshott, ‘Rationalism in politics’, op. cit., Ref. 6, p. 34.

^86. Oakeshott, ‘The voice of conversation’, op. cit., Ref. 23, p. 195.

^87. Oakeshott famously used the metaphor of conversation to describe the interaction of different modes or ‘voices’ within a civilization. See, e.g. Oakeshott, ‘The study of politics in a university’, in Rationalism, op. cit., Ref. 6, pp. 187–188; ‘Political education’, op. cit., Ref. 6, pp. 62–63; and ‘The voice of poetry in the conversation of mankind’, Rationalism, op. cit., Ref. 6, pp. 489–491, 497, 535. In his correspondence with Popper (see Ref. 42), Oakeshott also claims that politics is best understood on the model of conversation, an idea Popper found very appealing.