A Skeptical Conservative

National Interest, The, Fall, 2000 by Neil McInnes

Oakeshott was quite open about how inadequate all this would seem to earnest policymakers. They would see it as excessively skeptical, he conceded, as underestimating human possibilities, as frivolous, ironical, even playful. None of which bothered him, for at least such a style of politics was not self-defeating, as the politics of passionate rationalism inevitably and disastrously was. This did not convince even political thinkers who were quite near Oakeshott in temper. Hayek, for example, was waging a campaign against social "constructivism" that was parallel to Oakeshott's assault on rationalism in politics, but Hayek reasonably insisted that at the center there had to be a government armed with effective coercive power, which was necessary to the functioning of the market system--but which was also dangerous to personal liberty, and therefore had to be limited and in some way supervised. Keynes, too, had foreseen the objections to Oakeshott's brand of indolent conservatism, saying, "It leads nowhere; it satisfies no ideal; it conforms to no intellectual standard; it is not even safe, or calculated to preserve from spoilers that degree of civilization which we have already attained ... [we] must have an attitude, a philosophy, a direction,, [3]--in short, some sort of rational enterprise.

More fundamentally, it seems, there is the question whether, in the real world of politics from which Oakeshott was so remote, a state can even exist that is not in certain important respects a rational enterprise, notably in the matters of defense and foreign policy. His friend and editor, Timothy Fuller, says, after describing the modest adjudicator state, that Oakeshott

thought that the main obstacle to enjoying such a government was the unavoidable and continuous preparation for war that imposed on all modern governments the undertaking to organize society in terms of uniformity of goals, reinforced by infatuation with technology, and the belief that human beings could not be entrusted to take care of themselves unless directed by an extrinsic goal or purpose, an ideology.

Now this is getting the wrong end of the stick, with a vengeance: what is being presented as the obstacle to good government is in fact the necessary condition for the existence of any government at all, namely, the external pressures of foreign policy and defense. As Otto Hintze said in a seminal essay, "All state organization was originally military organization, organization for war." [4] Dismissing Marx's notion that class conflict was the driving force of history, Hintze added, "Conflict between nations has been far more important; and throughout the ages, pressure from without has been a determining influence on internal structure."

Cannon Fodder

INSTEAD, Oakeshott chose to look internally and found the same driving force as Marx, though he put a different value on it: the power behind rationalism in politics was the rise of mass man (a.k.a. the proletariat). In an essay, "The Masses in Representative Democracy", he declared there were, and had been since sixteenth-century Europe, two sorts of people, individuals and individuals man ques, depending on whether they made or failed to make the adjustment to the dissolution of the pre-modern community. Some people failed in this because of some "combination of debility, ignorance, timidity, poverty or mischance", whereupon they became anti-individualists and "sank into guilt, envy, jealousy and resentment." When they turned to militant politics, their servility and submissiveness made them so many mice for the Pied Pipers of collectivism, for they wanted a state that would plan equality, sharing, partnership and solidarity. The mere availability of such cannon fodder called up the modem leader, a "cunnin g frustrate", an egoist whose only satisfaction came from commanding other people. Obviously, this same story could be told in different ways: not as the consequence of a lack or a failure but as the rise of a different morality, alternative to "possessive individualism"; or as the story of the widespread alienation produced by an economic system; or as the plight of people whose only acquaintance with the economy was through a factory or bureaucracy or other large organization in which individualism was scarcely known. But Oakeshott told it in heavily moralistic language, and decreed that all the consequences of individualism manque' were bad.