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Summary
This article examines the nature of academic political theory in Britain in the post-war period, examining in particular the degree to which theorists were able to mount normative theoretical arguments. Traditionally, commentators such as Brian Barry and Perry Anderson have argued that political theory in this period was largely dead between 1945 and 1970 due to the impact of positivism, but I argue this is mistaken for two main reasons. First, it fails to distinguish between the different forms that positivism took in the post-war era. Thus although it is true many theorists tended to claim that moral and political values could (or should) not be discussed rationally, their reasons for doing so varied considerably. For while theorists such as A. J. Ayer and T. D. Weldon justified their positions theoretically, with arguments drawn from behaviourist social science or innovations made in linguistic philosophy, others, such as Ralf Dahrendorf and Anthony Crosland, argued that it was the perceived success of post-war welfare states or the alleged failure of political ideologies that made traditional political theory irrelevant. Second, following on from this, I argue that delineating more accurately how positivism actually operated helps to explain how political theorists were able to pursue their discipline normatively—albeit that few reacted to all aspects of positivism. Thus if some (such as Karl Popper) were more concerned to insist that political philosophy had something to say in practice, others (such as Michael Oakeshott), reacted more strongly against the proposition that human behaviour can be understood purely causally. Finally, I examine the impact of ordinary language philosophy on post-war political theory, and argue that rather than simply damaging the cause of normative political theory by encouraging a myopic concentration on the linguistic analysis of particular moral and political concepts, over the longer term its effects were much more positive, since it helped to focus attention on the irreducibly normative dimension of political concepts.
Acknowledgements
Previous versions of this article were given as papers at the Oxford History of Political Thought Seminar in October 2010, and at the Balzan-Skinner Colloquium on the History of Analytic Philosophy in May 2011. For helpful comments at these events, I would especially like to thank Tom Akehurst, Chris Brooke, John Filling, Matthew Grimley, Jose Harris, Joel Isaac, and Ben Jackson.
Notes
1John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA, 1971).
2See, for example, Michael Oakeshott, Morality and Politics in Modern Europe: The Harvard Lectures 1958, edited by S. R. Letwin (New Haven, 1993); Michael Oakeshott, ‘Introduction’, in Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, edited by Michael Oakeshott (Oxford, 1960), vii–lxvi; John Plamenatz, Man and Society: A Critical Examination of Some Important Social and Political Theories from Machiavelli to Marx, 2 vols (London, 1963).
3Richard Wollheim, ‘Equality’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 56 (1955/6), 281–300; Isaiah Berlin, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, in Liberty: Incorporating Four Essays on Liberty, edited by Henry Hardy (Oxford, 2002), 166–217.
4Alan Ryan, ‘John Rawls’, in The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences, edited by Quentin Skinner (Cambridge, 1985), 108.
5See Brian Barry, ‘The Strange Death of Political Philosophy’, in Democracy, Power and Justice: Essays in Political Theory, 2 vols (Oxford, 1991), I, 19. In Political Argument he writes that ‘the difference that Rawls made in A Theory of Justice was that he raised the stakes in political philosophy to a quite new level […] [since it] represents a return to the grand manner of political philosophising, complete with a theory of the human good, a moral psychology, a theory of the subject-matter (the “basic structure of society”) and the objects (the “primary goods”) of justice, and, of course, an immensely elaborate structure of argument in favour of a specific set of principles of justice’. Thus for Barry, ‘Rawls has made writing general treatments of political philosophy hard in much the same way as Beethoven made writing symphonies hard: much more is involved than before’; Brian Barry, ‘Introduction’, in Political Argument: A Reissue with a New Introduction (Berkeley, CA and Los Angeles, 1990), lxx.
6A particularly troubling (and systematic) argument that worried normative theorists working in the area of social policy in these decades was that put forward by Kenneth Arrow, usually called ‘Arrow's impossibility theorem’. Thus in a celebrated article and subsequent book, Arrow claimed that it was impossible to fulfil four highly plausible conditions, all at the same time, and hence impossible to formulate a reasonable normative position for the function of government, at least in this area. The first was ‘non-dictatorship’—namely that it should be possible to account for the wishes of multiple citizens, rather than just one. The second was one of universality—namely that it should be possible to obtain a complete (and not merely partial) ranking of citizens’ choices. The third condition was one of Pareto optimality—namely that if every individual citizen prefers a certain option to another, then so too must the ultimate preference order. The final condition was one of honouring the independence of irrelevant alternatives—namely that the final preference between two alternatives (x and y) must depend only on the individual preferences of x and y, and not on the ranking of irrelevant alternatives; see Kenneth J. Arrow, ‘A Difficulty in the Concept of Social Welfare’, Journal of Political Economy, 58 (1950), 328–46; Kenneth J. Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values (New Haven, CT, 1963). (Arrow's conditions alter slightly between the article and the book—those given here are the ones dating from 1963). That it seemed to be impossible to resolve this conundrum was a cause of major worry to those social and political theorists aware of Arrow's theorem, since it seemed to blow a hole in one of their major ambitions—namely the ability to provide a normative argument concerning what the state should do about social welfare.
7Indeed, some commentators claimed that the demise of political theory in Britain occurred even earlier. Thus Philip Pettit argued that ‘from late in the [nineteenth] century to about the 1950s political philosophy ceased to be an active area of exploration […]. There was lots done on the history of the subject […]. But there was little or nothing of significance published in political philosophy itself’, while Richard Tuck claimed that ‘the period from 1870 to 1970 was a very strange one in the history of thinking about politics in the Anglo-American world (and, to a lesser extent, on the Continent also) […] [due to] the absence of major works on political philosophy […] between Sidgwick and Rawls’. See Philip Pettit, ‘Introduction’, in A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, edited by Robert E. Goodin and Philip Pettit (Oxford, 1993), 8; Richard Tuck, ‘The Contribution of History’, in Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, edited by Goodin and Pettit, 72.
8It should be noted, however, that there was little consensus as to who the final one had been—opinion differed fairly sharply as to whether Bernard Bosanquet, Harold Laski, or R. G. Collingwood was the last.
9Peter Laslett, ‘Introduction’, in Philosophy, Politics and Society: A Collection, edited by Peter Laslett (Oxford, 1956), vii.
10Laslett, ‘Introduction’, in Philosophy, Politics and Society: A Collection, edited by Laslett, ix. For more discussion of Laslett's approach to political philosophy, see Petri Koikkalainen, ‘Peter Laslett and the Contested Concept of Political Philosophy’, History of Political Thought, 30 (2009), 336–59.
11Alfred Cobban, ‘The Decline of Political Theory’, Political Science Quarterly, 68 (1953), 331.
12Cobban, ‘Decline of Political Theory’, 328.
13Cobban, ‘Decline of Political Theory’, 326.
14See Perry Anderson, ‘Components of the National Culture’, in English Questions (London, 1992), 65–73 (69–71).
15As argued notably in Ernest Gellner, Words and Things (London, 1959). The book caused a major (if now largely forgotten) storm amongst professional philosophers when it was published at the end of the 1950s. For an account of the affair, see Ved Mehta, ‘A Battle Against the Bewitchment of Our Intelligence’, in Fly and the Fly-Bottle: Encounters with British Intellectuals (London, 1963), 11–42.
16Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (Cambridge, MA, 2000). As Bell himself points out, however, the phrase was originally coined by Albert Camus in 1946. See Albert Camus, Neither Victims, Nor Executioners (New York, 1980), 39.
17Obviously to say this is to identify a general trend, not a universal law. It is quite possible to find examples of thinkers in the 1930s who were sceptical of the USSR, most notably George Orwell; equally, a number of European intellectuals, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and in Britain Eric Hobsbawm remained—albeit with some qualifications—pro-Soviet.
18Both argued that Marx's theory of class was too focused on property ownership at the expense of other causes of inequality within modern capitalist (or post-capitalist) societies. See Ralf Dahrendorf, Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (Stanford, CA, 1959); C. A. R. Crosland, The Future of Socialism (London, 1956); Edmund Neill, ‘Varieties of Positivism in Western European Political Theory, c. 1945–1970: An Introduction’, this issue, note 18.
19This emphatically did not imply, however, that there was any consensus over why following a particular political ideology was inadvisable amongst positivists and non-positivists, or even over how ‘totalitarianism’ as a concept should be defined; see Neill, ‘Varieties of Positivism’, this issue, note 16. Aron's own scepticism about the utility of political ideologies largely stemmed from his Weberian belief that reason could not help us to decide between value-laden choices, as Jan-Werner Müller emphasises; see Jan-Werner Müller, ‘On Fear and Freedom: On “Cold War Liberalism”’, European Journal of Political Theory, 7 (2008), 53. (As such, political ideologies generally just represented more developed versions of subjective individual preferences, as far as Aron was concerned, rather than being positions genuinely derived from human reason). For more information on the conference itself, see Giles Scott-Smith, ‘The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the End of Ideology and the 1955 Milan Conference: “Defining the Parameters of Discourse”’, Journal of Contemporary History, 37 (2002), 437–55.
20There is thus some evidence that intellectuals found religion more palatable in this period than previously—as evidenced by the conversions of the philosophers Elizabeth Anscombe, Peter Geach and Michael Dummett, and the novelists Muriel Spark, William Golding and (more ambiguously) Doris Lessing to Catholicism. (Furthermore, the (rarely remembered) success of Bishop Stephen Neill's mission to Oxford University in 1947—when mass conversions took place over five nights in the Sheldonian Theatre—provides at least some anecdotal evidence for the relative popularity of religion amongst the educated in this period; see Peter J. Conradi, Iris Murdoch (London, 2002), 249–50). More widely amongst the public at large, although the evidence is somewhat ambiguous, religious observance did not seem to be declining rapidly, as it did by the 1970s.Thus, just to take one statistic, although infant baptisms per thousand declined from six hundred and seventy-two in 1950 to five hundred and fifty-four in 1960 within the Anglican church, confirmations per thousand actually rose from two hundred and seventy-nine in 1950 to three hundred and fifteen in 1960, as did the numbers taking communion and being ordained. At the very least there seemed to be some evidence that those attending the Anglican church were taking their observances more seriously. For these statistics, see Adrian Hastings, A History of English Christianity, 1920-2000 (London, 2001), 444.
21Karl Mannheim was only the most famous example of an intellectual advocating this position in the aftermath of World War II. He claimed that ‘we have never had to set up and direct the entire system of nature as completely as we are forced to do today with society […]. Mankind is tending more and more to regulate the whole of its social life’. See Karl Mannheim, Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction (London, 1940), 16.
22See, for a classic American statement of this position, S. M. Lipset, who claimed that ‘the fundamental political problems of the industrial revolution have been solved: the workers have achieved industrial and political citizenship; the conservatives have accepted the welfare state; and the democratic left has recognised that an increase in over-all state power carries with it more dangers to freedom than solutions for economic problems’. S. M. Lipset, Political Man (London, 1960), 4.
23It is important to note that even given this premise, this position remains debatable—especially if theorists do not claim they have full knowledge of the laws necessary to explain current human behaviour. Thus, for example, it might be entirely reasonable to claim that all human conduct is ultimately caused, and yet maintain we still need normative political theory until we have a complete knowledge of how such laws operate. This is arguably why J. S. Mill, despite his aspiration to found a science of human behaviour in the System of Logic, book VI—‘On the Logic of the Moral Sciences’—nevertheless devoted considerable energy to putting forward normative arguments in such essays as On Liberty, Utilitarianism, and the Considerations on Representative Government; see John Stuart Mill, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, edited by John M. Robson and Jack Stillinger, 33 vols (London, 1963–1991), VIII, 831–952; John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Other Essays, edited by John Gray (Oxford, 1998). For Gray's argument that this is the case, see John Gray, ‘Mill's Conception of Happiness and the Theory of Individuality’, in John Stuart Mill, J. S. Mill: On Liberty in Focus, edited by John Gray and G. W. Smith (London, 1991), 190–211.
24For influential examples, see David Easton, The Political System (New York, 1953); Harold D. Lasswell and Abraham Kaplan, Power and Society (New Haven, CT, 1950). It is worth remarking that even in the United States, behaviourism, though clearly influential, did not carry all before it; see Terence Ball, ‘Discordant Voices: American Histories of Political Thought’, in The History of Political Thought in National Context, edited by Dario Castiglione and Iain Hampsher-Monk (Cambridge, 2001), 107–33; Neill, ‘Varieties of Positivism’, this issue, note 11.
25A. J. Ayer, ‘Man as a Subject for Science’, in Philosophy, Politics and Society: Third Series, edited by Peter Laslett and W. G. Runciman (Oxford, 1967), 21, 23.
26One of the most trenchant of these was made by Bernard Crick, who strongly attacked the idea that the study of politics could be based upon any prior conception of human behaviour external to politics itself—whether this be treating human conduct as comprehensible in terms of social processes, laws, or other facts concerning human psychology; see Bernard Crick, The American Science of Politics: Its Origins and Conditions (London, 1959), 213–48. See also Michael Kenny, ‘History and Dissent: Bernard Crick's The American Science of Politics’, American Political Science Review, 100 (2006), 547–54. More widely, see John G. Gunnell, Imagining the American Polity: Political Science and the Discourse of Democracy (University Park, PA, 2004).
27See, for example, W. J. M. Mackenzie, Politics and Social Science (Harmondsworth, 1967), 301. For a useful article on Mackenzie's place in the postwar development of political studies in Britain, see Michael Kenny, ‘The Case for Disciplinary History: Political Studies in the 1950s and 1960s’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 6 (2004), 565–83 (573–76).
28Mackenzie, Politics and Social Science, 217–19.
29T. D. Weldon, The Vocabulary of Politics (Harmondsworth, 1953), 11–12.
30Weldon writes that ‘it is not the job of philosophy to provide new information about politics […] or any other matters of fact. Philosophical problems are entirely second order problems’. See Weldon, Vocabulary of Politics, 22.
31See T. D. Weldon, ‘Political Principles’, in Philosophy, Politics and Society: A Collection, edited by Laslett, 27–29.
32To be precise, Weldon wants to distinguish between questions of mere taste—such as whether or not we like peppermints—and those where rational argument is possible—as, for example, over secret ballots. But the reasons that can be given are not philosophical: ‘they are not the kind of reasons which Plato and his successors have believed to be both attainable and indispensable’. See Weldon, Vocabulary of Politics, 13–14.
33Thus Weldon declares the three aims of The Vocabulary of Politics to be ‘to show that the questions put by the traditional political philosophers are wrongly posed […]. In the light of these discussions to show that the theoretical foundations of political thinking […] are all equally worthless […]. To show that […] all that is discarded is some metaphysical lumber’. See Weldon, Vocabulary of Politics, 14–15.
34See too Jose Harris, who in a now justly classic article emphasises the lack of explicit input from moral philosophers in providing justifications for the welfare state after the collapse of Idealism—although she also stresses that Idealism retained its influence longer than many have allowed. As she points out, the lack of sophisticated intellectual support was perhaps less important when the welfare state appeared to be a self-evident success, but was much more significant later in the post-war period, when it came under sustained ideological challenge. See Jose Harris, ‘Political Thought and the Welfare State 1870-1940: An Intellectual Framework for British Social Policy’, Past and Present, 135 (1992), 116–41 (136–37).
35For Hart's analyses, see H. L. A. Hart, ‘Are there any Natural Rights?’, Philosophical Review, 64 (1955), 175–91; H. L. A. Hart, ‘Prolegomenon to the Principles of Punishment’, in Philosophy, Politics and Society: Second Series, edited by Peter Laslett and W. G. Runciman (Oxford, 1962), 158–82. Hart is of course best known as one of the most prominent advocates of legal positivism, but nevertheless there is still at least a minimal normative core at the heart of his concept of law. These consist of five components. First, he argues that human vulnerability implies that there should be a limit on the use of violence; second, that approximate equality means that forms of government are essential in the absence of a natural superiority of some over others; third, that the presence of limited altruism makes it necessary for there to be some formalised and compulsory rules; fourth, that more or less permanent scarcity implies that property rules are necessary; and fifth, that, given human nature, legislation is necessary to prevent free riding within a society; see H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law (Oxford, 1961), 189–95. Other examples of political theorists who took questions of political obligation, authority, and punishment seriously in this period—and found it equally difficult to avoid discussion of normative questions—include John Plamenatz, Hanna Pitkin, Richard Tuck and J. R. Lucas; see John Plamenatz, ‘Responsibility, Blame and Punishment’, in Philosophy, Politics and Society: Third Series, edited by Laslett and Runciman, 173–93; Hanna Pitkin, ‘Obligation and Consent’, in Philosophy, Politics and Society: Fourth Series, edited by Peter Laslett, W. G. Runciman and Quentin Skinner (Oxford, 1972), 45–85; Richard Tuck, ‘Why is Authority Such a Problem?’, in Philosophy, Politics and Society: Fourth Series, edited by Laslett, Runciman and Skinner, 194–207; J. R. Lucas, The Principles of Politics (Oxford, 1966), 323–32 and passim.
36The positivist picture of science is flawed for two reasons, Popper believes. First, it can never be the case that any hypothesis will be finally verified, once and for all, since one can never discount the possibility that one future counter-example will refute the original hypothesis. Thus the statement ‘all swans are white’ makes sense if it is understood as a falsifiable hypothesis, but not as a finally verified statement—a point that was graphically illustrated by the discovery of Australian black swans. (For a succinct account of Popper's theory of falsification, see Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (Abingdon, 2005), 120–25). Second, Popper maintains, although it is correct to say that a new scientific problem may inspire the generation of new hypotheses, it is wrong to argue that this occurs due to scientists’ prejudice-free observations. For although, Popper declares, ‘it is quite true that any particular hypothesis we choose will have been preceded by observations – the observations, for example, which it is destined to explain […] [nevertheless] these observations, in their turn, presupposed the adoption of a frame of reference: a frame of expectations: a frame of theories’; see Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations (London, 1972), 47.
37Popper insists that ‘science, and more especially scientific progress are the results not of isolated efforts but of the free competition of thought. For science needs ever more competition between hypotheses and ever more rigorous tests. And the competing hypotheses need personal representation, as it were: they need advocates, they need a jury, and even a public […]. Ultimately, progress depends very largely on political factors; on political institutions that safeguard freedom of thought: on democracy’. See Popper, Poverty of Historicism, 143.
38See Popper, Poverty of Historicism, 63–64.
39As Popper pithily puts it, satirising Marx's formulation in the Theses on Feuerbach, ‘the historicist can only interpret social development and aid it in various ways; his point, however, is that nobody can change it’. See Popper, Poverty of Historicism, 46.
40See especially Popper, Poverty of Historicism, 76–85. Such a position obviously raises the question of how useful tradition can be in helping to formulate ways of acting in the future. Earlier in his career, Popper is fairly sceptical about the value of tradition in this context, but later expresses a more positive and nuanced view; see Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, 120–35.
41Obviously there are many different types of utilitarianism, not least because what precisely a utilitarian should ‘maximise’ is contested, even amongst utilitarians themselves. Thus some would favour ‘pleasure’, others ‘needs’, and others again ‘well-being’, just to pick three prominent examples. By ‘negative utilitarian’, I mean that firstly Popper is mainly concerned to minimise suffering, rather than achieve any particular normative end, and, secondly that he does not advocate utilitarianism as a way of fostering societal ‘progress’ in the way that J. S. Mill famously did.
42Thus Popper insists that ‘what Marxists describe disparagingly as “mere formal freedom” […] i.e. democracy, the right of the people to judge and to dismiss their government, is the only known device by which we can try to protect ourselves against the misuse of political power; it is the control of the rulers by the ruled’. See Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, 2 vols (London, 1966), II, 127.
43Popper, Open Society, II, 124.
44Popper, Open Society, II, 186 note 36.
45It should be noted, however, that Popper believes that considerable progress has already been made in restraining the excesses of laissez-faire capitalism—a fact he believes should inspire us to intervene further: ‘since the day of Marx, democratic interventionism has made immense advances […] and it should encourage us to believe that more can be done’. See Popper, Open Society, II, 187.
46Popper, Open Society, II, 125.
47Popper, Open Society, II, 126.
48Popper, Open Society, II, 94.
49Thus, just to give one example, Popper believes that when trying to construct social institutions, it is important to have ‘some knowledge of social regularities which impose limitations upon what can be achieved by such institutions’. See Popper, Open Society, I, 67.
50Originally written for a diversity of publications, particularly the Cambridge Journal, which Oakeshott himself edited, these essays were collected together in 1962, under the title Rationalism in Politics; see Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, revised and expanded edition, edited by Timothy Fuller (Indianapolis, IN, 1991). More generally, this section on Oakeshott borrows from my book on this thinker; see Edmund Neill, Michael Oakeshott (New York, 2010).
51Thus in his late work, On Human Conduct, Oakeshott argues that the ‘distinction between “goings-on” identified as themselves exhibitions of intelligence and “goings-on” which may be made intelligible but are not themselves intelligent, is not a distinction between mental and physical or between minds and bodies regarded as entities. It is a distinction within the engagement of understanding, a distinction between “sciences” […] and the identities with which they are concerned’; see Michael Oakeshott, On Human Conduct (Oxford, 1975), 14–15. (Earlier in his career, notably in Experience and its Modes (Cambridge, 1933), Oakeshott had also argued that the distinction between modes of understanding implied nothing about the ontological status of the phenomenon being understood, but there contrasted ‘Science’ with the alternative modes ‘History’ and ‘Practice’, rather than positing a prior distinction between scientific and non-scientific forms of understanding. For an explanation of Oakeshott's earlier position, see Neill, Oakeshott, 17–31 (20–24)). However, given the sheer amount of time Oakeshott devotes to specifying how we can investigate human actions in terms of intelligent ‘human conduct’—as opposed to causally—there seems little doubt as to which mode of analysis he prefers. Still worse, however, he believes, are the attempts of psychologists and sociologists to reduce human actions that are understood to be the result of intelligent choices to mental processes or sociological laws—for this is to conflate systematically two entirely discrete forms of analysis; see Oakeshott, Human Conduct, 21–22.
52As we shall see, Oakeshott believes that the attempt to understand politics purely in terms of ‘solving problems’ is mistaken, since it indicates an over-reliance on the intellect, at the expense of the crucial role played by tradition and habit. See Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics, 27–28.
53By contrast, Oakeshott argues that a ‘teleocracy’, defined as ‘a government charged with a managerial task and responsibility’ is desirable only in wartime; in peacetime, he argues, a ‘nomocracy’—defined as a common framework of rules that does not prescribe substantive outcomes, and ‘which conforms to a judicial analogy’—is what is required; see Michael Oakeshott, ‘The Conservative Opportunity’, in The Vocabulary of a Modern European State, edited by Luke O'Sullivan (Exeter, 2008), 187. For Oakeshott's most developed description of these two forms of government (subsequently labelled ‘enterprise’ and ‘civil’ association, respectively), see Michael Oakeshott, ‘On the Civil Condition’, in Human Conduct, 108–84.
54Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics, 6.
55Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics, 7.
56Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics, 12–15.
57Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics, 15.
58Oakeshott had essentially come to this position by the time he wrote the essays ‘Rational Conduct’ (1950), and ‘Political Education’ (1951)—collected in Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics, 99–131 and 43–69—probably under the influence of Gilbert Ryle, and especially of Ryle's essay ‘Knowing How and Knowing That’, in The Concept of Mind (London, 1949), 26–60. For some suggestive comments on Oakeshott's changing position here, see Harwell Wells, ‘The Philosophical Michael Oakeshott’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 55 (1994), 129–45.
59According to Oakeshott, this is so not least because of how closely related ‘practical’ and ‘technical’ knowledge are to one another—as far as he is concerned, ‘practical’ knowledge resists easy compartmentalisation. Thus it is not the case, in other words, that one can distinguish between ‘practical’ and ‘technical’ knowledge by claiming that the distinction corresponds to one between ‘means’ and ‘ends’, or even that the difference is that technical knowledge tell us ‘what’ to do, while practical knowledge tell us ‘how’ to do it. For ‘even in the what […] there lies already this dualism of technique and practice’, Oakeshott maintains—giving the illustration of a doctor's diagnosis as an example. See Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics, 13–14.
60See W. H. Greenleaf, ‘Idealism, Modern Philosophy and Politics’, in Politics and Experience: Essays Presented to Professor Michael Oakeshott on the Occasion of his Retirement, edited by Preston King and B. C. Parekh (Cambridge, 1968), 93–124.
61This was a very common interpretation of Oakeshott's work in the 1950s and 1960s. See, just for one influential example, S. I. Benn and R. S. Peters, Social Principles and the Democratic State (London, 1959), 312–18.
62See, for example, Oakeshott's reply to his critics in the version of ‘Political Education’ collected in Rationalism in Politics, labelled ‘The Pursuit of Intimations’; see Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics, 66–69. (Originally, Political Education was published as a separate book in 1951).
63See Michael Oakeshott, ‘Rationalism in Politics’, in Rationalism in Politics, 5–42; Michael Oakeshott, ‘The Tower of Babel’, in Rationalism in Politics, 465–87. For Voegelin, Strauss, and Arendt's arguments, see Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (Chicago, 1952); Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago, 1953); Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, 1958). Arendt's position is more ambiguous than that of the other two since, although she has distinct worries about the nature of the Western (philosophical) tradition, arguably this does not lead her to retreat into nostalgia. Rather, she believes that modernity still offers at least some possibilities for the best kind of human activity, namely genuine political action—as she highlights in On Revolution (London, 1963). And indeed, despite being traumatic, Arendt contends, the final breakdown of the Western philosophical tradition in the twentieth century may in some ways make acting politically easier, though its corruption by technology remains a considerable danger. For a powerful work in favour of this reading of Arendt, see Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought (Cambridge, 1992). For a perceptive (albeit relatively brief) comparison of Arendt and Strauss, see Ronald Beiner, ‘Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss: The Uncommenced Dialogue’, Political Theory, 18 (1990), 238–54.
64See, for example, Strauss, Natural Right and History, 3.
65For a book-length argument in favour of Oakeshott being an anti-modernist see Roy Tseng, The Sceptical Idealist: Michael Oakeshott as a Critic of Enlightenment (Thorveton, 2003). For a critique of this position see Edmund Neill, ‘Review of Roy Tseng, The Sceptical Idealist’, English Historical Review, 119 (2004), 1010–12. The continuing popularity of reading Oakeshott as an anti-modernist can be shown by the fact that even commentators who identify his political theory as being essentially that of a liberal modernist, nevertheless continue to maintain that he regards the Western philosophical tradition since the Enlightenment as suspect. For just one example of this, see John Gray, Post-Liberalism: Studies in Political Thought (New York, 1993), 40–46.
66See Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics, 365–66. ‘The Masses in Representative Democracy’ is included in the expanded edition of Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics, 363–83. See also Oakeshott, Morality and Politics; Michael Oakeshott, ‘On the Character of a Modern European State’, in Human Conduct, 185–326.
67Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics, 366–68.
68Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics, 429.
69There remains, in other words, a major question in political theory as to how universal its normative prescriptions can be—or, in other words, the degree to which it is possible to transcend traditional and cultural norms. Obviously the dispute between Rawls and the communitarians represents one version of this quarrel, but it reoccurs in many guises in contemporary political theory—the (prolonged) debate between Gadamer and Habermas is another example. For a way into the former dispute, see Stephen Mulhall and Adam Swift, Liberals and Communitarians (Oxford, 1992). For an introduction to the debate, see Alan How, The Habermas-Gadamer Debate and the Nature of the Social: Back to Bedrock (Aldershot, 1995). See also the highly penetrating article by Paul Ricoeur, ‘Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology’, in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, edited and translated by John B. Thompson (Cambridge, 1981), 63–100.
70For a critique of this assumption, see J. L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia, edited by G. J. Warnock (Oxford, 1962); G. F. Paul, ‘Is there a Problem about Sense-Data?’, in Logic and Language: First Series, edited by Anthony Flew (Oxford, 1951), 101–16. By contrast, for the early Wittgenstein's view that ‘one name stands for one thing, another for another thing, and they are combined with one another. In this way the whole group—like a tableau vivant—presents a state of affairs’, see Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus, edited by A. J. Ayer, translated by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London, 1961), proposition 4.0311, 43.
71To quote Peter Strawson, an influential ‘ordinary language’ philosopher: ‘Why should it be supposed that the only way to gain understanding of the words which express the philosophically puzzling concepts was to translate sentences in which they occurred into sentences in which they did not occur?’. See P. F. Strawson, ‘Construction and Analysis’, in The Revolution in Philosophy, edited by A. J. Ayer and others (London, 1956), 103–04.
72Thus as Austin writes, strongly contesting this assumption: ‘why, if “one identical” word is used, must there be “one identical” object present which it denotes? Why should it not be the whole function of a word to denote many things? Why should words not be by nature “general”?’; see J. L. Austin, Philosophical Papers, edited by J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock (Oxford, 1970), 38. Thus, according to Wittgenstein, if we try to identify why we can use the same term—such as ‘game’—to describe different phenomena that all have something in common, this is not because there is one particular characteristic that all of them have in common; rather, when one actually looks, all one finds is a complicated network of similarities and relationships—a set of ‘family resemblances’ as Wittgenstein famously put it; See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, translated by G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford, 2001), sections 27–28, 66–67.
73It should be noted, however, that Austin differs somewhat from Wittgenstein here. If both agree that the meaning of words is ultimately to be explained by their use, and that language can perform a very wide number of activities, there is nevertheless in Austin's work more of an aspiration to produce a comprehensive classification of how language operates; see J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, edited by J. O. Urmson (Oxford, 1962). Wittgenstein, by contrast, was far more sceptical that any such classification could be attempted, since he laid more stress on the variability of language use in practice.
74Isaiah Berlin, Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays, edited by Henry Hardy (London, 1999), 79–80.
75Whether this charge really does justice to the subtlety of the ordinary language philosophers’ analysis of the will is highly questionable, of course. See, for example, Gilbert Ryle, ‘The Will’, in Concept of Mind, 61–80.
76Anderson, ‘Components of the National Culture’, in English Questions, 77.
77Gellner, Words and Things, 44. On a more popular level, ordinary language philosophy was also memorably satirised by Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller in a ‘Beyond the Fringe’ sketch in 1961. In the sketch, two highly mannered Oxford philosophers, named Bleaney and Urchfont, after a moment's uncertainty about whether one of them has used the word ‘yes’ ‘in an affirmative sense’, proceed to produce endless pseudo-analysis of word usage, before reaching the ludicrous conclusion that their analysis of the word ‘yes’ might have been of use in defusing a dispute between a shop assistant and a customer that one of them had observed—although he had not, in the event, actually bothered to. For the sketch, see <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = HVQrpok9KPA> [accessed 27 February 2012].
78Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, edited by Mary McCarthy, 2 vols (New York, 1978), II, 4.
79For a defence of ordinary language philosophy against the charge of conservatism, see Alan Wertheimer, ‘Is Ordinary Language Analysis Conservative?’, Political Theory, 4 (1976), 405–22.
80See Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy (London, 1958), 63. Winch argues that when considering actions made by humans without at least the possibility of reflection, ‘we are dealing not with meaningful behaviour but with something which is either mere response to stimuli or the manifestation of a habit which is really blind’. Although Winch in this context is in fact contrasting his view of ‘rule-following’ from Oakeshott, interestingly some have suggested that his position here also differs from that of his main philosophical inspirer, namely Wittgenstein—since the latter does not stress the importance of reflection in following rules to the same extent. See, for example, John B. Thompson, Critical Hermeneutics: A Study in the Thought of Paul Ricoeur and Jürgen Habermas (Cambridge, 1981), 120.
81Winch did not address the issue himself, but the contention that human conduct could only be understood in terms of rules that are applied intelligently led to considerable dispute about whether computers were (or one day would be) able to imitate human actions and conversation. This debate really began in earnest when Alan Turing proposed that the best way to test whether a machine could behave in the same way as a human was not to ask whether it could ‘think’, but rather whether it could act in the same way as a human, or, more specifically, whether it could imitate human behaviour. This has become known as the ‘Turing test’; see A. M. Turing, ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’, Mind, 59 (1950), 433–60. The test has stimulated considerable philosophical discussion, but has been highly controversial—for just one particularly famous rejoinder, which has itself spawned an enormous literature, see John Searle's case that the Turing test fails because it cannot distinguish between cases where a machine demonstrates genuine understanding, and where it simply manipulates the symbols correctly. (This is commonly known as the ‘Chinese room’ thought experiment); see John R. Searle, ‘Minds, Brains, and Programs’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3 (1980), 417–57.
82See, for example, Isaiah Berlin's argument in the essay ‘Logical Translation’ that ‘where it is obvious that types of proposition or sentence cannot be “reduced” or “translated” into one another without torturing the language until what was conveyed idiomatically before can no longer be conveyed so fully or clearly […] in the artificial language constructed to conform to some imaginary criterion of a “logical perfection”, such attempts should be exposed as stemming from a false theory of meaning, accompanied by its equally counterfeit metaphysical counterpart – a view of the universe as possessing an “ultimate structure”, as being constructed out of […] pieces of “ultimate stuff” which the “language” is constructed to reproduce’; Berlin, Concepts and Categories, 80. For a lucid exposition of Berlin's position here, which clearly demonstrates the close relationship between his more abstractly philosophical work and his later arguments about ethics and politics, see the excellent article by Jamie Reed, ‘From Logical Positivism to “Metaphysical Rationalism”: Isaiah Berlin on the “Fallacy of Reduction”’, History of Political Thought, 29 (2008), 109–31.
83Isaiah Berlin, ‘Does Political Theory Still Exist?’, in Philosophy, Politics and Society: Second Series, edited by Laslett and Runciman, 7.
84Berlin himself seeks to apply the conclusion that there cannot be an incontestable definition of certain ethical and political concepts very directly to political practice. In particular, he famously argues on this basis against a ‘positive’ definition of liberty which identifies the latter concept with the ability to order one's desires in accordance with an underlying ‘real’ will (as opposed to a ‘negative’ one, which defines liberty in terms of an absence of external constraints). And this is because, according to Berlin, the problem with such a ‘positive’ definition is that it necessarily commits one to the claim that liberty can be reconciled, once and for all, with other desirable moral and political values—such as justice and equality, for example. This is a claim that Berlin thinks is absolutely false; for his denial of this see Isaiah Berlin, ‘From Hope and Fear Set Free’, in Liberty, 278–79. For the famous essay on liberty, see Isaiah Berlin, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ (It should be said, of course, that the claim that advocating such a ‘positive’ definition of liberty necessarily commits one to such a moral monism as Berlin maintains, is, at best, highly contestable).
85W. B. Gallie, ‘Essentially Contested Concepts’, in The Importance of Language, edited by Max Black (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1962), 121–46. Other writers who drew attention to such concepts include Stuart Hampshire, who highlighted the fact that there are ‘some concepts that are permanently and essentially subject to question and dispute and are recognized to be at all times questionable’; see Stuart Hampshire, Thought and Action (New York, 1959), 230. See also Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘The Essential Contestability of Some Social Concepts’, Ethics, 84 (1973/4), 1–9.
86Gallie, ‘Essentially Contested Concepts’, 125.
87Gallie, ‘Essentially Contested Concepts’, 125.
88Gallie, ‘Essentially Contested Concepts’, 125.
89Gallie, ‘Essentially Contested Concepts’, 125. The phrase ‘aggressively and defensively’ comes from John Gray's attempt to explain Gallie's position; see John Gray, ‘On Liberty, Liberalism and Essential Contestability’, British Journal of Political Science, 8 (1978), 392.
90Gallie, ‘Essentially Contested Concepts’, 131.
91Gallie, ‘Essentially Contested Concepts’, 131.
92William E. Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse (Lexington, MA, 1974), 141. Connolly is quoting Felix Oppenheim's attempt at producing a value-free definition of liberty; see Felix Oppenheim, ‘“Facts” and “Values” in Politics’, Political Theory, 1 (1973), 56. For another highly influential work that emerged from thinking about essential contestability, see Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1975).
93Connolly, Terms of Political Discourse, 173.
94Thus Ball argues that any ideal which is based upon the possibility of complete agreement and consensus amongst those engaging in political dialogue—such as Habermas's ‘ideal speech situation’—is mistaken, because it fails to capture the vital importance of disagreement in virtually all political interaction. For although, Balls argues, ‘this discursive ideal is as old as Socratic dialogue […] by grasping the pole of anticipated consensus and playing down conceptual conflict one denatures political life and the language that makes that life both possible and necessary’, rather, ‘disagreement, conceptual contestation, the omnipresent threat of communicative breakdown, and the possibility of conceptual change are, as it were, built into the very structure of political discourse’. See Terence Ball, Transforming Political Discourse: Political Theory and Critical Conceptual History (Oxford, 1988), 13.
95Ball, Transforming Political Discourse, 14.
96Ball, Transforming Political Discourse, 14. One such fundamental contemporary conceptual dispute about democracy concerns the question of whether it is a system which is designed to record the total set of individual voters’ preferences accurately, or whether it is one that aims at producing rational agreement. Both aims could be plausibly represented as being intrinsic to democracy, but equally could imply highly divergent courses of action, and methods of voting.
97Ball, Transforming Political Discourse, 14. Emphases are my own.
98On the possibilities offered by such ‘critical conceptual histories’, and indeed their necessary lack of complete normative neutrality, see Ball, Transforming Political Discourse, 14–17 (17); Alasdair MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics (New York, 1966), 2–3. The question of whether such ‘critical conceptual histories’ are sufficient for the formulation of normative political arguments—or indeed whether there are any other options in any case—remains deeply controversial, of course. For one contemporary work that offers a way into this controversy, with a fascinating debate between the two authors on this very question (amongst others), see David Couzens Hoy and Thomas McCarthy, Critical Theory (Cambridge, MA, 1994). For what Ball's projected ‘critical conceptual histories’ would look like in practice, see Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, edited by Terence Ball, James Farr and Russell L. Hanson (Cambridge, 1989).
99Gray, ‘On Liberty, Liberalism’, 392.
100To quote Gray's own definition: open-textured concepts are ones where ‘there is no finite and determinate set of necessary and sufficient conditions that license their application’. See Gray, ‘On Liberty, Liberalism’, 393.
101Gray, ‘On Liberty, Liberalism’, 392–93.
102A further problem with Gallie's position, Gray argues, lies in his introduction of the idea of an ‘original exemplar’ to the original five conditions that supposedly define essential contestability. It simply seems false, he argues, to claim that disputes about (for example) democracy require the disputants to have an original exemplar of democracy in mind as a common reference point—even if they do not think that referring to such an exemplar can automatically resolve the dispute. And, he maintains, the claim that constant competition between current opposing versions of the concept should have the effect of enabling ‘the original exemplar's achievement to be sustained in an optimum fashion’ is if anything even more damaging, since it strongly suggests that Gallie is committing himself to a form of essentialism, inimical to the original idea of essential contestability. See Gray, ‘On Liberty, Liberalism’, 390–91.
103Gray, ‘On Liberty, Liberalism’, 393.
104Gray, ‘On Liberty, Liberalism’, 393.
105Gray, ‘On Liberty, Liberalism’, 393–94.
106See, especially, Gray, ‘On Liberty, Liberalism’, 394–95.