9 - Oakeshott’s Ideological Politics (2012)

Summary

Michael Oakeshott has always been hard to characterise in terms of political doctrines and ideological persuasions. Everyone agrees he is a sceptic, but there is much less agreement as to what his scepticism implies for politics. Is he a sceptical liberal in the line of Tocqueville and Acton? Or a sceptical conservative in the line of Hume? Or is he sceptical of all politics? He constantly refused conventional political labels, whether left or right, liberal or conservative, regarding them as the product of that rationalism in politics he so deplored. He firmly declared that his thought had nothing to with ideology, the most common form of rationalist doctrine. Ideology was intellectually empty and had corrupted politics. Ideologies according to Oakeshott have supplanted traditions of behaviour, providing cribs for behaviour rather than an education in the activity itself. An ideology is an ‘abstract principle or set of related abstract principles which has been independently premeditated’.

Despite these strictures, however, Oakeshott is still regularly claimed as a conservative political philosopher, regarded by many as the most significant conservative philosopher of the twentieth century, and regularly cited by conservative politicians and commentators as an important influence. He was even offered a knighthood by the Thatcher Government in the 1980s, but declined it. In many of his reviews and articles Oakeshott appears to be sympathetic to the conservative tradition, at least in England. Some of his contributions to the Cambridge Journal in the 1940s, and several of the essays collected in Rationalism in Politics, feature strong attacks on collectivism in general and the British Labour party in particular, as well as disparaging remarks about prominent standard-bearers of liberalism, including F.A. Hayek.

Yet on the other side are those who claim Oakeshott for liberalism, because of his deep attachment to the English liberal political tradition, his apparent sympathy for many of the ideas of nineteenthcentury economic liberalism, and his understanding of the state as a non-purposive association. Oakeshott distinguishes between two understandings of modern European states as forms of association, libertarian and collectivist, nomocratic and teleocratic, whose basis is whether the state exists to promote many purposes or a single purpose.