A Skeptical Conservative.

• Author: McInnes, Neil
• Position: Michael Oakeshott, former chair of political science at London School of Economics

IT IS NOW ten years since Michael Oakeshott died, in his ninetieth year and long after retiring from the chair of political science at the London School of Economics (LSE). So it is not surprising that some people should think that the time has come to rescue him from the limbo that claims celebrated writers after death and celebrated academics after retirement. It has been a long, quiet limbo, marked only by the publication of two small books he left in his desk drawers and not by the rise of any Oakeshottian school that might have applied or developed his teachings. Indeed, the only attention he has received in recent years has taken the form of musings about what possible relevance his metaphysical doctrines could have to political theory, not practical politics. As his most sympathetic expositor, Paul Franco, concluded, "To begin to work out what this political philosophy means for political life as we know it is the next step in understanding . . . Oakeshott's thought."* Less sympathetic students might have discouraged that "next step" by recalling Dr. Johnson's observation, "A High Tory makes government unintelligible--it is lost in the clouds." The great height from which Oakeshott poured scorn not only on politicians but on political scientists and even political philosophers gave his beautifully crafted essays (and his famously spellbinding lectures were essays read out loud) a rarefied charm, urbanity and dignity; but more practical (and more realistic) students were left hungry.

When Oakeshott was appointed to succeed Harold Laski at LSE, just when Churchill came back to power to end the era of postwar socialism in Britain, the appointment was condemned by many academics as a political one. To be sure, his airs and graces nourished the apprehension that he was a toff and a Tory dandy (in fact, he was the son of a civil servant), but he was no party man. The publisher's blurb on Steven Anthony Gerencser's The Skeptic's Oakeshott says that, "Mrs. Thatcher based much of her political philosophy on Oakeshott's theories", but this is wide of the mark. The systematic campaign Mrs. Thatcher ran to convert the Conservative Party to free-market ideology was exactly what Oakeshott condemned as "rationalism in politics" (and has been roundly denounced as such by John Gray in The Undoing of Conservatism). What theory she needed she got from Friedrich von Hayek, and Oakeshott would have none of his free enterprise ideology. In his view, "This is, perhaps, the main significance of Hayek's The Roa d to Serfdom--not the cogency of his doctrine, but the fact that it is a doctrine. A plan to resist all planning may be better than its opposite, but it belongs to the same style of politics."

Oakeshott's influence among students was surely conservative but not because he supported the right-wing case against Labour (he disdained polemics) so much as because he preached to them the vanity of any political activism whatever. J.L. Auspitz notes that, "Undergraduates from all over the world had flocked [to LSE] in the expectation of learning exactly what Oakeshott averred could not be taught." As Jeffrey Hart remarks, Oakeshott appalled LSE students by telling them "that their hopes for a better world were an illusion and that their guides had been charlatans."

Thought and Action

IN TODAY's jargon, what Oakeshott rejected was "the vision thing", "the big picture." Politics was not about that, he said, and politicians and intellectuals who said it was exerted a corrupting influence. Even if they avoided such dangerous flights of fancy, politicians found no favor with him, for politics was at best a necessary evil, a second-rate occupation. With what Robert Grant called "a sublime, even breathtaking aloofness", Oakeshott dismissed politics as "vulgar", "bogus", "callous" and a "false simplification." It was the domain of a hasty, truncated understanding of society. It was an endeavor of marginal significance, administrative in character, secondary in the life of a people, shallow and narrow, and superficial in its effects, especially when compared with the truly vital activities of art, literature and philosophy. How Bloomsbury can one get? The idea that politicians are not the great movers and shakers they take themselves to be is a familiar one, but the advantage is usually, and real istically, given to industrialists, scientists and entrepreneurs, not to artists, writers and philosophers. But science and industry are largely beyond Oakeshott's ken.

Other political scientists have held politicians in contempt (Pareto didn't think much of them, for instance), but this one did not think much of political scientists either. In an essay deceptively entitled "The Study of Politics in a University", Oakeshott curtly dismissed what passes for political "science" (notably in the United States) as mere vocational training, presumably for party hacks and journalists, and a failed and "worthless" training at that. His reasons for this low opinion of political science were not those of Hayek, for whom it was mere "scientism", the misguided application of the methods of natural science to intractable social material. Oakeshott thought the scientific treatment of human affairs was perfectly possible; it just was not profitable. As he wrote in On Human Conduct, it was "not an impossible undertaking. But it has little to do with human conduct and nothing at all to do with the performances of assignable agents." It would yield only certain...