In the wake of the Second World War, political theory
took an increasingly critical and sceptical turn, beginning to question those
traits associated with philosophical modernism. The products of the
enlightenment had for over a century and a half been associated with the
progressive move to a liberal and rational mindset. Science, both social and
natural, was supposed to deliver us from mass suffering, and yet many perceived
the rationalism at the foundation of science to be the very origins of the
totalitarian collapse defining the second fifth of the century. The National
Socialist abyss had been closed, and yet across the globe alternative projects
of a totalitarian nature still reigned supreme. How could rationality and
science have birthed the welfare state, modern economics, or individual
freedom, and yet also the moral and ethical cataclysm of book burnings,
eugenics and extermination camps?
Amongst others, the
British philosopher Michael Oakeshott was a commentator on this very question.1 An often-overlooked
thinker, after his service during the war Oakeshott returned to academia,
pursuing the line of inquiry he began with the publication in 1933 of arguably
his greatest single work ‘Experience
and Its Modes’. A work of British Idealism in its final moments, Oakeshott
here defends and elucidates a perception of philosophy conceptualised by
experience. Experience is always a world in itself, and thus implies some form
of thought or judgment because, through experience, the world is always and
everywhere a world of ideas; to mediate it is to experience it, and to mediate
and judge is to add to the ideas that form it. “Thus, truth and experience are
given together, and it is impossible to separate them. Truth is what is given
in experience, because what is given is given as a coherent world of ideas;
without truth there can be no experience”.2
Nonetheless, the
experience of the totalitarian nightmare adapted many a thinker’s grasp of how
we experience the political realm, and equally the place of such concepts as
‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’ in that realm. In 1947, Oakeshott published an essay
entitled ‘Rationalism in Politics’, where he chose to explore precisely what it
says on the tin – the nature and experience of Rationalism in the modern
political sphere.3 At
the crux of the essay, Oakeshott takes a critical stance against what he pens
as ‘modern rationalism’, judiciously investigating the connection between
modern utopian thinking, ‘reason’, ‘knowledge’ and political action.
Consequently, this essay has become a seminal text in the fields of political
theory and political philosophy, hence, warranting an exhaustive reading.
The purpose of this
paper is to interpret Oakeshott’s essay, explaining his critique for those who
are unfamiliar with Oakeshott’s system of thought. I have chosen to undertake a
textualist approach for two reasons. Firstly, as much as I would like to
embellish and thrust upon the reader my own understanding of Oakeshott’s text,
the scope of this piece is to simply explicate the ideas in the essay in the
same manner and order in which they appear. Secondly, a textualist approach
permits the structure of this piece to follow that of Oakeshott’s seminal
essay. I have structured this paper so it’s sections delve into and explain
each part of the essay in turn – mirroring its configuration. In this manner,
the novice to Oakeshott’s system of thought may read this piece in one hand,
and study the original essay with the other. Alongside this, I have chosen to
focus on what I consider the most significant concept Oakeshott elucidates in
the essay: ‘the sovereignty of technique (technical knowledge)’ as a defining
feature of modern Rationalism. Consequently, this interpretation of
‘Rationalism in Politics’ reads and runs the essay through such a concept,
utilising it as a key or legend to Oakeshott’s overarching critical evaluation
of the political thinking which governs our time.4 From here, we turn to Oakeshott.
—————————–
Michael Oakeshott’s ‘Rationalism in Politics’5
I.
Rationalism
as a Disposition of Perfectionism
The first section of
Oakeshott’s essay is perhaps the most revealing of the entire work, declaring
openly the purpose of his investigation. “The object of this essay is to
consider the character and pedigree of the most remarkable intellectual fashion
of post-renaissance Europe. The Rationalism with which I am concerned is modern
rationalism”. From the beginning, Oakeshott clearly discloses the intention of
his enquiry – to examine the wider tradition of modern rationalism and its connection
to modern political theory.
It is broadly understood
that we reside in the ‘modern’ era. In simple terms, ‘modernism’ is often
associated with the philosophical traits that erupted out of the enlightenment,
where empiricism, ‘reason’, secularisation and individual liberty became
primary values. In this sense, the political discourses we engage with in the
contemporary world are themselves mechanised within a rationalist framework.
All argumentation in the political arena must be of a reasoned form, connected
to some scientific logic one way or another – without such an affinity the very
validity of one’s political knowledge is thrown into question. If we take this
into account, all modern politics has become some incarnation of the wider
Rationalist philosophical project. Asking how this has come to be requires the
attitude of Hercule Poirot, Sherlock Holmes, or even Scooby Doo – one devoted
to deduce the origins and qualities of such an all-encompassing predicate, one
that validates the limits of acceptable political action, and it is Oakeshott
who here brandishes the magnifying glass to interpret the history and character
of modern rationalism.
Oakeshott begins by
associating Rationalism not to central idioms or principles, but to a specific
disposition concerning the political sphere. Disposition or attitude to the
experiences of the world can often reveal and connect with increasing depth, as
opposed to merely categorising principles. Thus, the question becomes: what
characterises the rationalist disposition? This is the underlying question
Oakeshott is keen to answer, aspiring to unearth the dispositional fundamentals
of modern rationalism as a whole entity.
Oakeshott ties
rationalism to a singular epistemological foundation, one characterised by the
constant appeal to ‘reason’. He identifies the underpinning of rationalism
rests initially with its un-anchoring of thought from restriction; here
affirming that freedom of thought stems from only the “obligation to any
authority save the authority of ‘reason’”. Through such an appeal, the
Rationalist disposition is coloured by an argumentative and somewhat
paradoxical attitude. It is weary of authority and tradition, and as such, can
sit in direct contradiction to ‘reason’ in certain circumstances where
consensus and authority are necessary; “at once sceptical and optimistic”,
critically assessing all but the power of reason itself.
Subsequent to the
constant appeal to ‘reason’, the kind of categorical argumentation that lends
itself to experiential knowledge falls into question, reassessing all
experiences but one’s own as dubious. Reason demands that the experiences of
others, of ancestors, of those in another spatial temporality are subject to
the kind of scrutiny and doubt that the rationalist will not afford their own
experiences. The appeal to reason lulls the rationalist to rest safe in the
empirical knowledge that their own experience is the singular truth of such a
phenomenon. Because of this: “he has no sense of the culmination of experience,
only of the readiness of experience when it has been turned into a formula: the
past is significant to him only as an encumbrance”. What Oakeshott affirms is
that all life must be compounded into some formula in order to be rationalised.
All experience must be derivable through the reason that anchors their
episteme. The mysteries of life, the simple admiration of the sublime, myths,
fables, the ‘uncertainties of experience’ – all lost to the abyss.
In order to rationalise
all life under the banner of reason, the rationalist recalibrates the meaning
of intellectual inquiry not to the education of their mind, but, rather, its
fine-tuning to reasoning; to demonstrate their own mental capacity and draw
conclusions as opposed to drawing on collective and shared experiential
knowledge. “If he [the rationalist] were more self-critical he might begin to
wonder how the race ever succeeded in surviving”. From this moment onwards,
Oakeshott structures his inquiry by reviewing the very epistemological grounds
that Rationalism rests upon, attacking the Rationalist scepticism of common
experience. Oakeshott claims that consequent to their episteme of reason, the
rationalist holds: “a deep distrust of time, an impatient hunger for eternity
and an irritable nervousness in the face of everything topical and transitory”.
Subsequently, as the present is always anchored in history, a loss of the past
is always a loss of the present, a loss of something of ourselves in the here
and now.
The greatest of victory
for the Rationalist has been in the political sphere, where the philosophy of
reason as a framework for mediating the world has been carried into the realm
of public affairs. “He [the rationalist] believes that the unhindered human
‘reason’…is an infallible guide in political activity”. In simple terms, the
mark of the Rationalist is the disposition to utilise reason as a legend or
manual for conducting political activity. This is what has characterised the
epoch defining shift to a bureaucratisation of life, the Kafkan transformation
to the ‘rational’ administration of life itself, with its unlimited
jurisdiction over the circumstances of experience.
Reason as the logic
steering political activity: “makes both destruction and creation easier for
him to understand and engage in, than acceptance or reform”. A prudent
acceptance of that which cannot be rationalised in either the public or private
spheres is a trait of traditionalist conservatism. The rationalist wishes to
collapse and recreate in a cycle that undermines the extent to which collective
past experience can inform our faculties of judgement in the present. “He does
not recognise change unless it is self-consciously induced change, and
consequently he falls easily into the error of identifying the customary and
traditional with the changeless”. One only has to think of the revolutions
littering modern history, in which factions have seized power, reduced the
powers and institutions of the status-quo to ashes, and then attempted to
recast the community anew.
Such a logic of and
reliance on ‘reason’ alone traps ‘the political’ in a framework of a
Rationalist making, where one can only be a political agent if they speak from
a coherent, reasoned, body of logic aimed at recasting civil association in
some way. This Oakeshott refers to as ‘ideology’, or as he explains it: “the
formalised abridgment of the supposed substratum of rational truth contained in
the tradition”.
‘Ideology’, as the
primary means to interpret and act in the political arena, defines the
Rationalist disposition to politics as one characterised by the “assimilation
of politics to engineering”. Through the prism of rationalism, modern politics
became a myth about engineering a social world, as opposed to working with the
world of confusion within which we already reside. Politics, by way of
ideology, is about dealing with abstractions, utopias, ideal types, and all by
implementing quick fix engineering of policy to immanentise a world without
contradiction or mystery. Sensitivity to that which we cannot know or explain
is lost to the rational – all must fall to reason.
As a result of such a
loss, Oakeshott contends that the politics rationalism inspires is a ‘politics of the felt need’,
whereby the needs and feelings of the moment are paramount to all other modes
of experience. The best explanation of this is, of course, in Oakeshott’s own
words:
“His [The Rationalist’s] politics are, in fact, the
rational solution of those practical conundrums which the recognition of the
sovereignty of the felt need perpetually creates in the life of the society.
Thus, political life is resolved into a succession of crises, each surmounted
by the application of ‘reason’”.
The task of the rationalist is governed by the ‘sovereignty of the
felt need’, where the issues of the day are of paramount importance, more
significant than grander principles or questions that stretch across time. In
this sense, the sovereignty of the felt need dictates that political practice
be an exercise of rewriting experiential knowledge with every juncture.
At this point, Oakeshott
makes clear what he defines to be the two most central qualities of
Rationalism, indicating that rationalist politics are a combination of (a)
perfectionism and (b) uniformity. Rationalism, therefore, operates in the space
between these characteristic traits. Here, there is no political issue that
cannot be rationalised, and this applies to even the most ambiguous and mystic
of questions. In this sense: “the ‘rational’ solution of any problem is, in its
nature, the perfect solution”. Perfection comes through reason, and reason
dictates that such perfection can be universal, and in this vein, eradicates a
certain notion of plurality in favour of reasoned uniformity. For the
rationalist, there is no place for epistemological variety. “There may not be
one universal remedy for all political ills, but the remedy for any particular
ill is as universal in its application as it is rational in its
conception…Political activity is recognised as the imposition of a uniform
condition of perfection upon human conduct”.
Rationalist politics, because of its emphasis on
perfectionism and uniformity of reasoned application, is ‘projectional’. All
modern history is littered with examples of grandiose projects intended to
alleviate the ills of current experience by the application of a rational
ideological framework of theory and praxis upon the realm of human conduct.
Power becomes the capacity to enforce one’s framework of reason and application
of a solution over a certain territory As such, modern sovereignty is
understood by the rationalist as the ultimate decision making power of such an
ends. Be it by the Declaration of the Rights of Man, by the cosmopolitan
notions of a world state, by the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, or by the
supposed natural predicates of racialist science, the founding of society, for
the Rationalist, sits on a grounds of eradicating the old and instituting the
new by the logic of some supposed self-contained unified truth of reason. Such
a logic is posited in the theory and praxis of projects that can be
universalised with but the click of one’s fingers.
II
The
Two Modes of Knowledge and The Sovereignty of Technique
In order to dissect and
analyse the episteme of Rationalism, Oakeshott devotes the second section of the
essay to addressing the Rationalist grasp of knowledge. He begins this
discourse by reasserting the connection between epistemology and practical
conduct, stating that: “Every science, every art, every practical activity
requiring skill of any sort, indeed every human activity whatsoever, involves
knowledge”. Here, he reminds us that all human activity involves some form of
knowledge in order to engage in a course of action, bisecting knowledge into
two kinds: (a) Technical Knowledge, and (b) Practical Knowledge. Oakeshott
discusses each in turn.
Technical knowledge is
the kind of knowledge that can be learnt and is without a doubt involved in
every practical activity, as in almost every practical activity there is a
technique. An essential aspect of technical knowledge is its formulation into a
series of rules, which can be meticulously learnt in order to put a specific
technique into practice effectively. Oakeshott gives a good example of the
‘Highway Code’ in which part of the technique of driving a car on British roads
is disclosed, or how the techniques of cooking can be located in cookery books.
All one has to do is rigorously learn the technique in order to practice it
perfectly, reaping results.
The second mode of
knowledge is Practical knowledge. Unlike technical knowledge, practical
knowledge exists in its use and cannot be codified or formulated into rules
which can be learnt. Essentially, Oakeshott confirms that practical knowledge
is the kind which may be shared and over time become common knowledge. In every
activity there is always also this sort of knowledge at play. In fact, the
pursuit of any concrete activity, the mastery of some practice so that it may
become a ‘skill’ is impossible without the interplay of practical knowledge and
technical knowledge, both distinct and symbiotic simultaneously.
“These two sorts of knowledge, then, distinguishable
but inseparable, are the twin components of the knowledge involved in every
concrete human activity…technique and what I have called practical knowledge
combine to make skill”.
Even in scientific activity, the very methods of modernist
empiricism exist within the confines of the interplay between the two modes of
knowledge. Simply put, there is no activity which exists outside of the orbit
of this dualism, technique may create guidelines of practice, but only common
knowledge may reveal how to follow such guidelines, and in this sense there is
no such thing as ‘know-how’. Both modes of knowledge are simply inseparable.
It is at this moment
that Oakeshott begins to assess his two modes of knowledge through a political
lens. He claims that in the same manner as all other conduct, political
activity is both technical and practical. One must be able to engage common
knowledge and technique in order to develop political skill. In a somewhat
existential manner, Oakeshott maintains that being a political agent requires both practical
knowledge and mastery of technique in order to achieve the goals of political
activity, whatever they may be. After addressing their inseparability in
application, Oakeshott seeks to then differentiate them.
The first
difference is that technical knowledge may be codified, and as such, receives a
sense of validity in the Rationalist episteme that is not afforded to practical
knowledge. “Technical knowledge, in short, can be both taught and learned in
the simplest meanings of these words. On the other hand, practical knowledge
can be neither taught nor learned, but only imparted and acquired”. Precisely
because technique can be learnt, it has acquired a sense of validity, or even
elevated to the status of truth, whereas this gives practical knowledge: “the
appearance of imprecision and consequently of uncertainty, of being a matter of
opinion, of probability rather than truth”. Practical knowledge can only be acquired
by observing its application in practice, as opposed to merely learning it from
a set of codified rules. For example, the statement that there are ‘seven days
in the week’ is common knowledge. However as it is ultimately not objective
fact written within the fabric of reality itself, but rather a human artificial
framework of ‘time’ placed over reality, its very validity may be questioned as
a truth all together.
Another example may be
that of ‘style’. Whether it is the style of the Cricketing batsman, the
pianist, the dancer, the writer, the painter, and so on, style cannot be taught
but is acquired through practice over time. As it cannot be learnt, however,
its validity as valuable knowledge falls into question. Bach’s style of playing
is often deemed subordinate to his outstanding technical ability,
Michelangelo’s style of sculpture, or even Dostoyevsky’s writing similarly so.
In the modern world, technicality is increasingly validated, with style and
practical knowledge de-valued.
For Oakeshott, revealing
his overarching critique, Rationalism asserts that practical knowledge is no
knowledge at all, and that there is no knowledge which cannot be reduced to
technicality – e.g. if it cannot be taught or codified into rules, it is not
knowledge. Equally, knowledge is only that which can be taught. Such a position
Oakeshott charges as the ‘sovereignty
of technique’, and constitutes the grounds of the epistemological
foundations of Rationalism. The grievance here, in Oakeshott’s typically
conservative fashion, is that the sovereignty of technique erases the validity
of practical and traditional knowledge altogether; that knowledge which cannot
be written or taught is lost, and as such the capacity to engage with all forms
activity with it. With the loss of one is the loss of the necessary interplay
to act politically. Common experience becomes inadequate to confirm the
existence of a mode of knowledge itself. The sovereignty of reason is hence
connected to the sovereignty of technique.
In this manner, ‘knowledge’
transmutates into a rough teleological frame. One begins at a point of
distinguishable sheer ignorance (prior to teaching) and the process of
acquiring knowledge ends at an identifiable terminus, where teaching is
complete and one has successfully ‘learnt’ what there is to know, like learning
the rules of a sport, or how to use a mechanical device. In fact, under the
epistemological boot of Rationalism, knowledge itself is seen to be applied
mechanically.
At the initial point of
ignorance, the teacher must administer a purge in order to mechanically rebuild
the student’s knowledge of the topic at hand, where all prejudices and
preconceptions are removed, reinstating it with a sense of learned certainty.
This Oakeshott exclaims is the work of ideology over traditions of thought,
purging the student of prejudices and preconceptions so to give the appearance
of self-containment and reasoned validity.
The self-contained
validity of mechanising all knowledge as technical knowledge presents the
illusion of certainty. The error of the rationalist, Oakeshott contends, is the
illusion of the sovereignty of technique, convincing the individual of its
superiority as it appearance springs by washing away ignorance, both beginning
and ending in the certainty of such a relation in the first instance. “As with
every other sort of knowledge, learning a technique does not consist of getting
rid of pure ignorance, but reforming knowledge which is already there”.
A self-contained
technique cannot be imparted to an ‘empty mind’. Rather, technical knowledge
builds from practical knowledge, the kind of knowledge that we begin all
endeavours with. By neglecting practical knowledge, by the sovereignty of
technique, the rationalist hacks away at the very grounds of technical knowledge.
Through such a self-contained certainty of technical knowledge, the rationalist
unhooks themselves from their own grounds, ignoring the relational symbiosis of
both forms of knowledge. To privilege one is not just to devalue the other, but
by this process of devaluation, corrupt the very grounds that are prioritised,
precisely as the two are but parts of the same whole.
Before continuing to the third section, Oakeshott
makes note that his object is not to refute rationalism, per se, but merely to
highlight its errors so to reveal something of its character. Thus, with its
epistemological illusions in mind, he goes on to assess its character, with the
priority of the sovereignty of technique and the confidence in human reason by
such sovereignty in the third section.
III
Certainty
and Method Concerning the Infallible Rules of Discovery
In the third section of
the essay, Oakeshott directs his efforts to examining the emergence of
Rationalism as connected to the early modern philosophy of science. In this
sense, Oakeshott utilises the third section of his investigation in order to
sketch out the connection between the scientific notions of ‘truth’, ‘method’
and ‘reason’, and the political principles of Rationalism in practice.
Ultimately, this began with the insights of Sir Francis Bacon, and his
discourse on the scientific method in the seventeenth century.
Bacon identified a
lacuna in the methodological habits of inquiry. What lacked in the seventeenth
century was a: “consciously formulated technique of research, an art of
interpretation, a method whose rules had been written down”. In order to make
understanding and ‘truth’ manifest, Bacon highlighted that inquiry lacked a
procedure of honing ones knowledge through the practice of a technique itself. The
assumption that Bacon made was that a ‘sure plan’ was necessary in order to
access ‘truth’. What was deemed requisite for accessing truth was “a ‘way’ of
understanding, an ‘art’ or ‘method’ of inquiry, an ‘instrument’ which…shall
supplement the weakness of natural reason: in short, what is required is a
formulated technique of inquiry”. Once again, Oakeshott draws the reader’s
attention to his single greatest critique of Rationalism: the sovereignty of
technique.
The sovereignty of
technique begins with Bacon precisely as he identifies that ‘truth’ is not
manifest, it does not merely make itself accessibly immanent to the individual,
but rather through a technique, a ‘method’, truth is uncovered. Such technique
would only become manifest if it can be accordingly codified, and subsequently
made objective in its certainty of success. ‘The art of research’ that Bacon
recommends has a three-fold character. Firstly, it appears as a set of rules. A
technique of inquiry can be formulated as a detailed set of guidelines, which
can be learned by heart. Thus the priority of technical knowledge, as something
that can be learned, is at the heart of Bacon’s scientific method. Secondly,
this set of rules may be applied mechanically. This technique of inquiry is
truly a technique because it is replicable by any who seek ‘truth’, and can be
practiced time and again, simply, by following the same steps of procedure to
achieve success repeatedly. It is the interplay between these first and second
characters which make Bacon’s technique of enquiry a ‘method’ in and of itself.
Lastly, Bacon’s ‘method’ is universal in character. Bacon’s method is grasped
as a ‘true’ technique because it is applicable in all scenarios, in all forms
of inquiry, irrespective of the subject matter. At least supposedly.
What Oakeshott
identifies as being critically significant is that such a form of technique is
itself plausible in the first instance. What Bacon proposes is a universal key
to accessing any and all forms of truth, irrespective of subjectivity. Such a
proposition is what Oakeshott is deeply critical of. “For what is proposed –
infallible rules of discovery – is something very remarkable, a sort of
philosopher’s stone, a key to open all doors, a ‘master science’”. In
this the primacy of method comes to bear and its universality apparent in
certainty.
Certainty of knowledge
became the aim of the early Rationalists, the telos of their endeavours. Like
Bacon, Descartes pursued a precisely formulated technique of enquiry, one that
could unlock the certainty of truth universally. At the core of Descartes
technique of inquiry was, like Bacon, a purge of the mind precisely as
certainty would only surrender itself to the emptied mind, the erased canvass. One must
find a manner of jettisoning preconceptions and prejudices for certainty and
truth to become manifest in the wake of truly objective enquiry. Such an
intellectual purge is the first pillar of Descartes tripartite. The second is,
in keeping with the sovereignty of technique, a codified set of rules that
compose an infallible, mechanical and universal method to unlock the truth and
certainty of knowledge. Lastly, Descartes affirms that there are no
grades of knowledge, what is not certain is simply as good as unknown, what is
not certain is as good as ignorance or nescience. Nonetheless, although Bacon
and Descartes share these qualities in their perspective concerning a technique
of inquiry, Descartes’ framework permits critical enquiry when applied,
affording a sense of scepticism through his affinity to the significance of doubt upon the mental
categories. Thus, through his own critical capacity, even Descartes comes to
recognise that supposing method is the sole means of inquiry is to err, as
behind all method is the reality of an existing human, bound up with their own
inconsistencies and passions. Nonetheless, the intellectual successors of
Descartes, to this very day, believed to have learnt from him “the sovereignty
of technique and not his doubtfulness about the possibility of an infallible
method”. From here, the rationalist character “may be seen springing from the
exaggeration of bacon’s hopes and the neglect of the scepticism of Descartes”.
. The focal charge
Oakeshott presents is that as time has passed, the epistemological foundation
of Rationalism has become rougher, ignorant of practical knowledge so entirely,
that the sovereignty of technique has left the modern Rationalist unable to
conceptualise even its barest and simplest of qualities. Therefore, the very
fact of life and our approach to is reduced from an art to, unsurprisingly, a
mere technique. “It is important only to observe that, with every step it has
taken away from the true sources of its inspiration, the Rationalist character
has become cruder and more vulgar…What was the Art of Living has become the Technique of Success”.
At the heart of this turn away from simple humanity to a promethean monism of
truth was the decline in the belief of providence, displaying how modernist secularism was not
simply a turning away from religion in its entirety, but merely a mutation of
theological epistemology: “a beneficent and infallible technique replaced a
beneficent and infallible God”.
This being said,
Rationalism did not establish itself without resistance or opposition. The
first of such critics, it can be said, was Pascal – in response to the
empiricism of Descartes. Firstly, Pascal perceived that the Cartesian technique
for acquiring knowledge was grounded “upon a false criterion of certainty”.
Simply, this implies that Descartes begins with an indubitable foundation upon
which to build his notion of certainty anchoring his technique of inquiry. This
led him, according to Pascal, to believe that all knowledge must be technical.
Secondly, Pascal affirmed that the influence of method endangers the success or
outcome of inquiry. This is so, precisely as the importance of method may
undergo exaggeration of some form. Thus, the method is the key to unlocking
knowledge, not the understanding and interpretation of reality itself. Art is,
once again, substituted for technique. The best explanation of this, I believe,
comes from Oakeshott himself, who at the end of the third section claims that:
“The significance of Rationalism is not its recognition of
technical knowledge, but its failure to recognise any other: its philosophical
error lies in the certainty it attributes to technique and in its doctrine of
the sovereignty of technique; its practical error lies in its belief that
nothing but benefit can come from making conduct self-conscious”.
It is what Rationalism deems as facile, limited or
insignificant that Oakeshott laments as being lost with its tide. What has been
lost is the very existence of common knowledge, the practical knowledge that
one can only acquire, in favour of sovereignty of technique, where all ills and
issues are solvable, all is knowable, simply by the application of method, by
applying the correct technique of inquiry. Just as Heisenberg’s uncertainty
principle testifies, with emphasis of understanding and inquiry upon a single
entity, understanding of another independent unit is lost. Just as Rationalism
emphasises method to achieve knowledge, that which cannot be achieved by
technique alone is itself disregarded as certain knowledge – something becomes
lost unintentionally and this is what Oakeshott wishes to guard against.
IV
Rationalism
as an Ideology of Technique for the Inexperienced
Leading on from the
third section, Oakeshott states that he is still yet to discuss the
circumstances under which rationalism became the predominant ideational force
in modern Europe. In fact, he goes so far as to pen rationalism by the term
‘infection’ reducing his considerations for it to that of a disease. Although
this has a certain unsavoury basis, as with all pathologisation, reducing an
entity to that of an illness requiring antidote or eradication (a rationalist
predicate in itself), the thrust of Oakeshott’s argument is to contend that
Rationalism has become the defining feature of the totality of our
epistemological, and as such normative, political experience. “Not only are our
political vices rationalistic, but so are our political virtues…Rationalism has
ceased to be merely one style in politics and has become the stylistic
criterion of all respectable politics”. The question thus becomes how has such
a condition come to be.
The answer to this is,
at least for Oakeshott, a rather succinct one. As Rationalism widely took hold
of modern epistemological categories, the traditional resources of resistance
to the tyranny of Rationalism were converted into ideological doctrines – plans
to resist planning, as in the case of Hayek’s ‘The Road to Serfdom’ for
example. Thus, even the traditional modes of resistance against Rationalism had
become paradoxically rationalist themselves; Rationalism became like a black
hole, absorbing and adding to its own mass the masses of objects which stood in
its path. The essential feature here is the conversion of all political
discussion onto the sublimated plane of doctrinal or ideological projects,
fiercely in dialogue with one another. “It seems that now, in order to
participate in politics and expect a hearing, it is necessary to have, in the
strict sense, a doctrine; not to have a doctrine appears frivolous, even
disreputable”. Here we find one of Oakeshott’s most enlightening conservative
critiques of the modern age – to be considered political one must now have a
doctrine or face disrepute Acting as a lone thinking agent or from a loose
tradition of discourse is no longer acceptable, and as such, limits the
boundaries of what and who may be considered ‘political’; an anti-political
decision in itself.
Rationalism appears as
the politics of ‘the felt need’. This perspective is qualified not by ‘concrete
knowledge of permanent interests’ by a ‘reason’ and “satisfied according to the
technique of an ideology: they are the politics of the book”. Rationalism has
itself a theological hermeneutics of reason, where normative issues (‘the felt
need’) and the deliverance of a response to such issues are defined by
appealing to and interpreting a single series of doctrinal texts, or merely
going to the trouble of constituting one themselves. This is the triumph of
technical knowledge par excellence, where the boundaries of the political are
itself defined by which rules of technique, to appeal to ‘the felt need’, are
deemed acceptable. Thus, we have witnessed in response to the dominance of such
a condition the abandonment of the ‘the self’ and the long process of truly
subjective critical inquiry, sold in exchange for simply grasped and ‘reasoned’
doctrines. Practical and perennial knowledge of experience traded for
mechanical technical knowledge which “does not extend beyond the written word”.
Such a theological hermeneutics appeals to abstraction – and as such modern
politics has become a single practical discourse of supposedly antagonistic
pelagian and projectual technical knowledge.
Through its dependence
on such a mode of knowledge, Rationalism and the doctrines under its broad
conceptual umbrella can never present more than abstract technique. What we
have gained is the pharmaceutical syndrome – ‘take this x times a day and the
problem will be solved’. All issues become ludicrously solvable, no matter how
ingrained into human experience and existence they are, and as such, the
partnership between the present and past knowledge of this fact becomes lost.
Nevertheless, the intent to solve all ills leads to techniques of control, and
politics becomes an exercise not in civic association, as it is by definition,
but an exercise in administration – simply which technique should be employed
to address the ‘felt need’. In this sense, one does not need an understanding
of experience to engage in the political, but only an understanding of
technique – “the politics of Rationalism are the politics of the politically
inexperienced”. We must always be aware that, as Oakeshott contends, we have
forgotten Rationalism is not a magic technique which will remove the handicap
of inexperience and lack of political understanding – “to offer such a
technique will seem to him [the rationalist] the offer of salvation itself”. We
must never forget that we are not Gods; the promise of a mechanically applied
technique of immanentising salvation is precisely that – an empty promise that
is always too good to be true.
Although in the previous
chapters Oakeshott had traced where Rationalism as a tradition of thought stems
from (the modernism of Descartes and Bacon), what Oakeshott now seeks to do is
triangulate the location of the Rationalist approach in the field of political
studies, and, as either the first political modern or final medieval, he
locates it in the work of Niccolo Machiavelli. In his famed work ‘The Prince’ [1532],
Machiavelli aims at forging a pamphlet for princes and rulers alike so they may
learn to be the best rulers they can, what has often been called a ‘Mirror for
Princes’. Despite a widespread misunderstanding of Machiavellism, essentially
converting his name into a slur, at the heart of his project was to forge a
‘science’ of politics, a technique by which an individual can study and
mechanically enact – like a recipe book for good and virtuous statecraft.
In this sense, according to Oakeshott, Machiavelli is the initial domino of
political Rationalism, forging a work similar to a ‘correspondence course in
technique’, or rather as Oakeshott pens it rather well: “The project of
Machiavelli was, then, to provide a crib to politics, a political training in
default of a political education, a technique for the ruler who had no
tradition”. It is this last clause which makes all the difference for Oakeshott
– in lieu of the capacity to judge for oneself, off the back of one’s own
experience and understanding of the world, the ruler in this position (without
tradition) could make manifest a technique to incur a desired outcome, once
again neglecting the symbiosis of both technical and practical knowledge.
The issue however does
not rest with Machiavelli. Machiavelli understood the limitations of his
technical manual for statecraft. Machiavelli clearly grasps and sceptically
questions the limits of technical knowledge as a replacement for tradition and
philosophical inquiry. The normative and epistemological political tyranny of
Rationalism does not begin with Machiavelli, but with his successors, those
followers of Machiavelli who: “believed in the sovereignty of technique, who
believed that government was nothing more than ‘public administration’”. This
is the beginning of the road to Rationalism’s totalising influence over ‘the
political’.
Oakeshott goes on to
discuss Rationalism at what he considers its most concentrate – the thought of
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Although the nineteenth century Marxians
engaged with genuine philosophical inquiry at seminal moments (for example, in
Marx’s magnum opus ‘Capital: A
Critique of Political Economy’), their most influential text was of course
‘The Communist Manifesto’ of
1848. Here, Oakeshott interprets The Manifesto as an instructional pamphlet
composed for the least politically educated faction of society who has ever
brandished the capacity to hold power (assuming this faction being ‘the
proletariat’). Every facet of the manifesto deals in the rationalism associated
with the sovereignty of the technique. Oakeshott charges the mechanisation of
technique by the masses as requiring being a ‘Midas-like’ operation, where all
that Marxians touch must be transformed into a philosophy of abstraction in
order to be applied, a paradox in and of itself. In these abstractions, the
world appears as concrete, vested in the Historical Materialist Dialectic that
Marx and Engels disclose, and as such, such a form of knowledge imposes on the
world itself.
Essentially, the onset
of political modernism, as typified by the Liberal Democratic American
political system, is defined by the conflict between lived experiential
tradition and abstract principles – principles that were advanced to the status
of natural entities. Two such examples of abstract principles would be (a)
Lockean inalienable rights, that ‘by nature’ every individual possess rights
which cannot be subtracted away (such as ‘life’, ‘liberty’ and ‘property’), or
(b) the Marxist materialist conception of history, that ‘by nature’ production
divides society by the roles we play in the process of producing articles of
existence (objects). In the Rationalist understanding, modern political society
is limited in its potential trajectory with the hampering of tradition and ‘the
chains of custom’. Tradition therefore is something to be emancipated from, as
opposed to being stood on the shoulders of. It is this very fact that Oakeshott
takes issue with; perfection is the aim and reconstruction of the political
realm the mechanism to deliver salvation. In this manner, the past is always
further from perfection itself.
The important point that Oakeshott makes however is
that we cannot expect an impending shift from Rationalism as a whole.
Ultimately, to plan for such a social shift is to slip into the vestiges of
Rationalism itself. Oakeshott contends that:
“The view I am maintaining is that the ordinary practical politics
of European nations have become fixed in vice of Rationalism, that much of
their failure (which is often attributed to other and more immediate causes)
springs in fact from the defects of the Rationalist character when it is in
control of affairs, and that (since the rationalist disposition of mind is not
a fashion which sprang up only yesterday) we must not expect a speedy release
from our predicament”.
Rationalism posits itself between politics and perfection, and it
is because of this that the citizen of the modern civil association, the
political agent, can be bewitched by the offer of fusing the apple back to the
tree of knowledge. Attempts to do this, Oakeshott argues, always result in not
only failure but the adaptation of the social and political world for the worse
– like Icarus, falling from the skies and his certainty of knowledge.
V
Conclusion
In the final section of
the essay, Oakeshott summates his overall argument. This most important
summative notion he focuses attention to is the dual manner in which
Rationalism is a danger to political society. The first charge that Oakeshott
puts to the Rationalist mindset is the misconception of knowledge as the
sovereignty of technique. By applying mechanically the techniques disclosed in
a single text, one loses a sense of holistic critical inquiry: “living by
precept in the end generates intellectual dishonesty”. Such dishonesty can be
untangled, but only by reasserting the importance of practical, historical and
tradition knowledge. The paradox of course arises as the Rationalist themself
sees such a form of knowledge as ‘the great enemy of mankind’. This invariably
will lead to governance by one rationalist project after another, with the wake
of one failed project becoming the launch pad for another.
Secondly, rationalism
breeds rationalism. A rationalist society that privileges the sovereignty of
technique over practical knowledge will educate future generations in the
idioms which themselves suppress an appreciation of past, traditional, and
contemplative knowledge. Thus, training in technical knowledge has become the
only training worthwhile. This, for example, we can see in the academic study
of political theory, as many prone to the Rationalist conjecture simply wish to
be delivered the thought of individuals such as Nietzsche or Heidegger through
a simple technique, ignoring the fact that an understanding of their systems of
thought can only be met by being honed, through a long hermeneutic relationship
that is constantly in a state of flux – not ‘knowledge’ administered as a pill
in the form of a simple all-encompassing explanation at most three minutes in
length. The best example of Rationalism’s epistemological domination of the
times comes in the form of ‘The Dummies guide to…’ or ‘an idiots guide to…’
books, where dense subjects are reduced to mere technique to be mechanistically
employed by the in-experienced, who then may consider themselves a master.
In the final moments of
Oakeshott’s essay, he leaves the reader with an interesting thought. As
Rationalism distrusts all practical knowledge by ‘reason’, we in the
contemporary world experience the suspension of moral and ethical foundations.
Simply put, Oakeshott reaches out through the page and asks the reader: How are
we to act if we must distrust all that we in the past have judged to be true? 6
________
1 For
more works discussing this very same topic, see: Hannah Arendt (1998) The Human Condition, 2nd Edition, Chicago, IL:
The University of Chicago Press; Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1997) Dialectic of Enlightenment,
London: Verso; E.H. Carr (2001) The Twenty Years’ Crisis 1919-1939: An Introduction To The Study of
International Relations, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan; Hans J.
Morgenthau (1946) Scientific
Man vs Power Politics, Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press;
Hedley Bull (1966) ‘International Theory: The Case for a Classical Approach’, World Politics, 18(3), pp.
361-377.
2 Michael
Oakeshott (1985) Experience
and Its Modes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 323.
3 Michael
Oakeshott (1962) Rationalism
in Politics and Other Essays, London: Methuen & Co Ltd, pp. 1-36.
4 This
I have chosen to do in order to streamline my interpretation of this essay into
a single, unified, critique, easily accessible to the novice. Nonetheless, this
being said, nothing can replace one’s own multi-faceted interpretation of an
essay. I strongly advise the reader to make their own interpretations of this
work of philosophical art.
5 Quotations
from here on out are from: Michael Oakeshott (1962) Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, London: Methuen
& Co Ltd, pp. 1-36
6 For
more information concerning Oakeshott’s political theory, see: David Boucher
(2008) ‘Oakeshott, Freedom and Republicanism’, The British Journal of Politics and International
Relations, 7(1), pp. 81-96; J. R. Archer (1979) ‘Oakeshott on
Politics’, The Journal of
Politics, 41(1), pp. 150-168; David Orsi (2015) ‘Oakeshott on Practice,
Normative Thought and Political Philosophy’, British Journal for The History of Philosophy, 23(3), pp.
545-568; Bhikhu Parekh (1979) ‘The Political Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott’, British Journal of Political
Science, 9(4), pp. 481-506; Paul Franco (2004) Michael Oakeshott: An Introduction, New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press; Terry Nardin (2015) Michael Oakeshott’s Cold War Liberalism, New York:
Palgrave Macmillan; Kenneth Minogue (2012) “The Fate of Rationalism in
Oakeshott’s Thought”, in Paul Franco and Leslie Marsh (Eds.), A Companion To Michael Oakeshott,
University Park, PA: The Pennsylvanian State University Press, pp. 232-247.