A Skeptical Conservative

National Interest, The, Fall, 2000 by Neil McInnes

The Uses of Social Science

IN GENERAL, theorists like Oakeshott and Hayek are often arbitrary in drawing the line between rationalist political constructions and those institutions that have grown to no one's design over long periods of time. The distinction is not as clear-cut as it sounds. Because the Constitution is a good thing, it cannot be allowed to be an instance of rationalism in politics; but because the welfare state is (or has become) a bad thing, it is travestied as a political design deduced from the rationalist construction "social justice." It is not seen to have grown imperceptibly out of an old tradition, but must have been created by a political party, perhaps at the time of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, or in Britain's Beveridge Report of the 1940s, or, in the German case, in backroom deals between Bismarck and Lassalle. In reality, the welfare state is a stage in the evolution from the poor relief of Elizabethan times, and from religious charity via private benevolence, to social insurance. It is a classic examp le of the unplanned, dispersed, incremental growth of an institution, and one that was only brought under central government responsibility after the Second World War. Of course, that does not protect it from any criticism one may care to offer, except from the charge that it is culpable "constructivism" or "rationalism in politics."

If there was one crucial turning point in the development of the welfare state it was not a political intervention but an application of natural science to social affairs, that is, just the sort of thing Oakeshott said would be of no interest or importance. This was when the Belgian mathematician and astronomer Adolphe Quetelet showed that social statistics (then called "moral statistics") could be collected on such things as crime, mortality and accidents. Until then, workers' compensation for the distressingly frequent factory accidents of early industrialism (mosdy involving steam) could only be established by judicial action to determine individual responsibility. But once the frequency and regularity of accidents were fixed, there was the actuarial basis for a system of insurance to cover the risks. And once factory accidents were seen as an insurable risk, so were unemployment, poverty, sickness and so on, until the notion of comprehensive social insurance (as in the Beveridge Report) appeared. My poin t is not simply that workers' compensation is the historical basis of the modern welfare state, [5] but that Oakeshott was wrong to think that the regularities and aggregates of social science were irrelevant to human conduct.

He was not only wrong but unfair to himself in saying that political philosophy is nugatory and irrelevant to political life. Insofar as it provides the tools for criticism of political ideas, it will always be of the utmost and urgent relevance, because politics is above all the domain of prejudice, fraud, deception and self-deception. The sort of criticism Oakeshott leveled at rationalism in politics--when he aimed straight and hit the planners and social engineers and not the modern state itself--was a useful weapon to put into the hands of conservatives. Much of his criticism of the state seen as an enterprise association, that is, as having in hand the interests of all members instead of protecting them to pursue their own chosen interests, was helpful in the exposure of solidarism, the passing off of limited sectional interests as everybody's interests. Since that is one of the most common frauds in politics, both on the Left and on the Right, Oakeshott had more relevance than he claimed.