Michael Oakeshott, RIP

National Review, Jan 28, 1991 by Jeffrey Hart

MICHAEL OAKESHOTT established modesty as a philosophical principle, indeed as a category of being. At the same time, and not paradoxically, he was a towering figure. Among other things, he was the most important political thinker in the Anglo-Saxon tradition since Burke (and I have not overlooked J. S. Mill).

Michael Oakeshott was the guest of honor at NR's twentieth-anniversary celebration, the proceedings that year taking place in two parts. First was an address by Oakeshott at Hunter College, and later a banquet at the Plaza Hotel. When we received Oakeshott's paper at the NR office, it proved to be unexpectedly abstruse and abstract. All previous Oakeshott had been splendidly lucid. With a straight face, James Burnham turned the problem over to me. "In the philosophical journals," he said, "it is customary in the case of difficult papers for the editor to give a brief summary of what has just been said. I wonder if you will do that for us here." Yes, I would, and I even had to ask the first question of Oakeshott.

Leaving the auditorium, I heard a woman say, "This was Buckley's greatest hoax. That wasn't Michael Oakeshott. That was an actor playing a philosopher." And yet difficult as that paper was, it adumbrated one of Oakeshott's major contributions to political clarification. His shift toward abstract generalization moved what had previously been implicit, as in Rationalism in Politics (1962), to the level of general theory. This became crystallized in On Human Conduct (1975), which proposed a theory of the state which came down to earth in the practice of Margaret Thatcher.

Oakeshott rejected managerial government in favor of civil association. Government was not to be a teleocracy, imposing purposes and plans. Its function was to lay down neutral rules which citizens would observe while pursuing whatever ends or purposes they chose for themselves. The social order would amount to an unending series of adjustments and exchanges, with no plan or goal or system, except the fostering by individuals of existence at the highest possible civilized level. Oakeshott saw politics as a mode of protecting and adjusting customary forms of behavior, which rested upon experience. He loathed a politics which would impose new and unexperienced behavior.

Hovering in the background are the great skeptics (skeptics, that is, about the possibility of certain knowledge): Hume, Montaigne, Pascal, Cervantes. And, of course, Burke, though the degree of Burke's skepticism, perhaps deep, remains a question still open to serious investigation. Oakeshott's skepticism was in practice not an enervating but an animating force. It was first outlined in his Experience and Its Modes (1933), a brilliant philosophical curiosity which fused skepticism with the idealist tradition.

In Rationalism and Politics, Oakeshott's skepticism pointed toward Burke. What is knowledge"?

Technical knowledge can be learned from a book; it

can be learned in a correspondence course. Moreover,

much of it can be learned by heart, repeated by rote, and

applied mechanically.... On the other hand, practical

knowledge can neither be taught nor learned, but only

imparted and acquired. It exists only in practice, and

the only way to acquire it is by apprenticeship to a master-not

because the master can teach it (he cannot) but

because it can be acquired only by continuous contact

with one who is perpetually practicing it. Practical knowledge is thus an "activity." In his Reflections, discussing the decision to remove James II in 1688, Burke takes as his hero Lord Somers, the "statesman" who through long practical experience knew" that King James had to be removed, but preserved as much of tradition in doing so as could be preserved.

When Oakeshott replaced Harold Laski in 1951 as professor of political science at the London School of Economics, it was felt to be a momentous event. Laski had been a foremost spokesman for the old socialism. Oakeshott offered something different.

The term "post-modem" today means many things, but it has a particular application to Oakeshott. His skepticism, his sense of natural limits and the human scale, freed him from the modern experience of Angst and alienation, which are really the flip side of a hunger for utopian perfection. Like his hero Montaigne, he had emotions that were overwhelmingly positive. Late at night, as the NR festivities were winding down at the Plaza Hotel, I heard Michael Oakeshott whisper to a pretty young woman, "Just call me Mickey."

In his late eighties, Oakeshott became the center of a dining, drinking, and discussion society in Caius College, Cambridge, sitting into the small hours with the young men. His conversation had a curiously innocent, even child-like quality, often very funny. He taught his friends that every question was open in the "great conversation," and his epistemology was ultimately "practical." He embodied the "practical knowledge of civilization."

He died at his home in Acton, Dorset, on December 19, 1990, at age 89.