Michael Oakeshott
Michael Joseph Oakeshott was an English philosopher. He is known for his contributions to the philosophies of history, religion, aesthetics, education, and law.
Early life and education
Oakeshott was born in Chelsfield, London, on 11 December 1901, the son of Joseph Francis Oakeshott, a civil servant with the Inland Revenue, and member of the Fabian Society, and Frances Maude, daughter of George Thistle Hellicar, a well-off Islington silk-merchant. His sister Violet married economist and social reformer Gilbert Slater. His uncle Harold's first wife was women's rights activist Grace Oakeshott, though there is no evidence that Michael knew her. He attended St George's School, Harpenden, a new co-educational and 'progressive' boarding school from 1912 to 1920. He enjoyed his schooldays, and the Headmaster, the Rev. Cecil Grant, a disciple of Maria Montessori, later became a friend.In 1920, Oakeshott matriculated with a Scholarship at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he read history, taking the Political Science options in both parts of the Tripos, the University of Cambridge's degree examinations. He graduated in 1923 with a first-class degree, subsequently promoted to MA, and was elected a Fellow of Caius in 1925.
As a University of Cambridge student, he admired the British idealist philosophers J. M. E. McTaggart and John Grote, and the medieval historian Zachary Nugent Brooke. He said that McTaggart's introductory lectures were the only formal philosophical training he ever received. The historian Herbert Butterfield was a contemporary, friend and fellow member of the Junior Historians society.
After graduation in 1923, Oakeshott pursued theology and German literature in a summer course at the universities of Marburg and Tübingen, and again in 1925. In between, he taught literature for a year as Senior English Master at King Edward VII Grammar School, Lytham, while simultaneously writing his fellowship dissertation, which he said was a 'dry run' for his first book, Experience and its Modes.
Career
Oakeshott was dismayed by the political extremism that occurred in Europe during the 1930s, and his surviving lectures from this period reveal a dislike of Nazism and Marxism. He is said to have been the first at Cambridge to lecture on Marx. At the suggestion of Sir Ernest Barker, who sought to see Oakeshott succeed to his own chair of political science at the University of Cambridge, he produced an anthology, with commentary, The Social and Political Doctrines of Contemporary Europe, published in 1939. For all its muddle and incoherence, as Oakeshott saw it, he found representative democracy the least unsatisfactory, in part because "the imposition of a universal plan of life on a society is at once stupid and immoral."Second World War
Oakeshott joined the British Army in 1940, before being conscripted under the National Service Act. He volunteered for the virtually suicidal Special Operations Executive, where the average life expectancy was about six weeks, and was interviewed by Hugh Trevor-Roper, who felt that he was "too unmistakably English" to conduct covert operations on the Continent.Oakeshott saw active service in Europe with the battlefield intelligence unit Phantom, a semi-freelance quasi-Signals organisation which also had connections with the Special Air Service. Though always at the front, the unit was seldom directly involved in any actual fighting. Oakeshott's military competence did not go unnoticed, and he ended the war as Adjutant of Phantom's 'B' Squadron and an acting major.
Postwar
In 1945, Oakeshott was demobilised and returned to the University of Cambridge. In 1949, he left Cambridge for Nuffield College, Oxford, but after only two years, in 1951, he was appointed Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics, succeeding the leftist Harold Laski, an appointment noted by the popular press. Oakeshott was deeply unsympathetic to the student activism at LSE during the late 1960s, and highly critical of what he saw as the authorities' insufficiently robust response. He retired from the LSE in 1969, but continued teaching and conducting seminars until 1980.In his retirement, he retreated to live quietly in a country cottage in Langton Matravers in Dorset with his third wife. He was twice divorced and had numerous affairs, many of them with wives of his students, colleagues and friends, and even with his son Simon's girlfriend. He also had a son out of wedlock, whom he abandoned together with the mother when the child was two, and whom he did not meet again for nearly twenty years. Oakeshott's most famous lover was Iris Murdoch.
Oakeshott lived long enough to experience increasing recognition, although he has become much more widely written about since his death. Oakeshott declined an offer to be made a Companion of Honour, for which he was proposed by Margaret Thatcher.
Philosophy
Early works
Oakeshott's early work, some of which has been published posthumously as What is History? and Other Essays and The Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence, shows that he was more interested in the philosophical problems that derived from his historical studies than he was in the history, even though he was officially a historian. Some of his very early essays are on religion, though after his first marital break-up he published no more on the topic except for a couple of pages in his magnum opus, titled On Human Conduct. However, his posthumously published and voluminous Notebooks show a lifelong preoccupation with religion and questions of mortality. In his youth he had considered taking Holy Orders, but later inclined towards a non-specific Romantic mysticism.Philosophy and modes of experience
Oakeshott published his first book in 1933, Experience and its Modes, when he was thirty-one. He acknowledged the influence of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and F. H. Bradley; commentators also noticed resemblances between this work and the ideas of thinkers such as R. G. Collingwood and Georg Simmel.The book argued that our experience is usually modal, in the sense that we almost always have a governing perspective on the world, be it practical or theoretical. One may take various theoretical approaches to the world: natural science, history and practice, for example, are quite separate, immiscible modes of experience. It is a mistake, he declared, to treat history on the model of the sciences, or to read into it one's current practical concerns.
Philosophy, however, is not a mode. At this stage of his career Oakeshott understood philosophy as the world seen, in Spinoza's phrase, sub specie aeternitatis, literally "under the aspect of eternity", free from presuppositions, whereas science and history and the practical mode rely on certain assumptions. Later Oakeshott adopted a pluralistic view of the various modes of experience, with philosophy just one voice among others, though it retained its self-critical character.
According to Oakeshott, the dominating principles of scientific and historical thought are quantity and pastness respectively. Oakeshott distinguished the academic perspective on the past from the practical, in which the past is seen in terms of its relevance to our present and future. His insistence on the autonomy of history places him close to Collingwood, who also argued for the autonomy of historical knowledge.
The practical world view presupposes the ideas of will and value. It is only in terms of these that practical action, for example in politics, economics, and ethics, makes sense. Because all action is conditioned by presuppositions, Oakeshott saw any attempt to change the world as reliant upon a scale of values, which themselves presuppose a context in which this is preferable to that. Even the conservative disposition to maintain the status quo relies upon managing inevitable change, a point he later elaborated in his essay "On Being Conservative".
Post-war essays
During this period, Oakeshott published what became his best known work during his lifetime, the collection entitled Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, and notable for its elegance of style. Some of his near-polemics against the direction that Britain was taking, in particular towards socialism, gained Oakeshott a reputation as a traditionalist conservative, sceptical about rationalism and rigid ideologies. Bernard Crick described him as a "lonely nihilist".Oakeshott's opposition to political utopianism is summed up in his analogy of a ship of state that has "neither starting-place nor appointed destination... the enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel". He was a severe critic of E. H. Carr, the Cambridge historian of Soviet Russia, claiming that Carr was fatally uncritical of the Bolshevik regime and took some of its propaganda at face value.
''On Human Conduct'' and Oakeshott's political theory
In his essay "On Being Conservative" Oakeshott characterised conservatism as a disposition rather than a political stance: "To be conservative... is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss."Oakeshott's political philosophy, as advanced in On Human Conduct, is free of any recognisable party politics. The book's first part develops a theory of human action as the exercise of intelligent agency in activities such as wanting and choosing, the second discusses the formal conditions of association appropriate to such intelligent agents, described as "civil" or legal association, and the third examines how far this understanding of human association has affected politics and political ideas in post-Renaissance European history.
Oakeshott suggests that there had been two major modes or understandings of political organization. In the first, which he calls "enterprise association", the state is understood as imposing some universal purpose on its subjects. By contrast, "civil association" is primarily a legal relationship in which laws impose obligatory conditions of action but do not require the associates to choose one action rather than another.
The complex, technical and often rebarbative style of On Human Conduct found few readers, and its initial reception was mostly one of bafflement. Oakeshott, who rarely responded to critics, replied sardonically in Political Theory to some of the contributions made in a symposium on the book in the same journal.
In his posthumously published The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism Oakeshott describes enterprise associations and civil associations in different terms. In politics, an enterprise association is based on a fundamental faith in human ability to ascertain and grasp some universal good, and civil association is based on a fundamental scepticism about human ability to either ascertain or achieve this good. Oakeshott considers power as a necessary prerequisite for the Politics of Faith, because it allows people to believe that they can achieve something great and to implement the policies necessary to achieve their goal. The Politics of Scepticism, on the other hand, rests on the idea that government should concern itself with preventing bad things from happening, rather than enabling ambiguously good events. Oakeshott was presumably dissatisfied with this book, which, like much of what he wrote, he never published. It was evidently written well before On Human Conduct.
In the latter book Oakeshott employs the analogy of the adverb to describe the kind of restraint that law involves. Laws prescribe "adverbial conditions": they condition our actions, but they do not determine their substantive chosen ends. For example, the law against murder is not a law against killing as such, but only a law against killing "murderously". Or, to choose a more trivial example, the law does not dictate that I have a car, but if I do, I must drive it on the same side of the road as everybody else. This contrasts with the rules of enterprise associations, in which the actions required by the management are made compulsory for all.