Michael Oakeshott

Michael Joseph Oakeshott was an English philosopher and historian of political thought, professor at the London School of Economics from 1951 to 1969, whose work supplied the most philosophically demanding statement of conservatism produced in the twentieth century. His conservatism is not a programme. It is the recognition that political life is a particular kind of practice, irreducible to the techniques and explicit doctrines with which the rationalist temperament tries to replace it.

Three works form the core. Experience and Its Modes (1933) sets out the philosophical anthropology. Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (1962, expanded 1991) gathers the central polemics. On Human Conduct (1975) provides the systematic statement.

Key Takeaways

• English political philosopher (1901–1990), the twentieth century’s most rigorous account of conservatism as a temperamental disposition rather than a doctrine.
• “Rationalism in Politics” (1947) is the canonical critique of treating political knowledge as a body of explicit rules detachable from the practice it describes.
• On Human Conduct (1975) distinguishes civil association (a non-purposive moral order) from enterprise association (organised pursuit of common ends), the philosophical basis of his anti-managerialism.

History And Context

Oakeshott was born in Chelsfield, Kent, the son of a civil servant and a nurse. He read history at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, took a fellowship there in 1925, served in the Phantom Reconnaissance Regiment in the Second World War, and after a brief period at Nuffield College, Oxford, succeeded Harold Laski in the chair of political science at the LSE. He held the chair through the 1950s and 1960s and retired to Langton Matravers in Dorset, where he continued to write until his death.

The intellectual context is the British academy’s mid-century absorption of two opposed currents: the linguistic philosophy of Wittgenstein and the policy-science ambition of social democratic planning. Oakeshott was unsympathetic to both — to the first because it under-described the intellectual coherence of historical practices, to the second because it over-described the legibility of social life to administrative reason. His critics from the left treated him as a quietist; his defenders argued that his “scepticism in politics” was a substantive political position, not the absence of one.

The Conservative Position

Oakeshott’s conservatism rests on a distinction between two types of knowledge. Technical knowledge is what can be formulated as rules and propositions: the contents of a manual, a recipe, a code. Practical knowledge is what cannot be so formulated — the cook’s judgement of when the dough is ready, the politician’s sense of when a measure will overreach, the sailor’s reading of the wind. Practical knowledge is acquired by apprenticeship to a practice; it cannot be transferred by instruction alone.

The rationalist, in Oakeshott’s account, treats all knowledge as if it were technical. He believes that political wisdom can be set out in a textbook and applied by anyone who has read it. The result is a politics that mistakes the manual for the practice, and increasingly governs societies as if they were engineering projects rather than inherited forms of association. The 1947 essay traces this temperament from Bacon through the philosophes to twentieth-century planners.

His mature work develops a parallel distinction in On Human Conduct. Civil association is the relationship of persons under common law — a non-purposive moral order in which citizens are united by their shared subjection to authoritative rules, not by any common project. Enterprise association is the relationship of persons in pursuit of a substantive purpose: a firm, an army, a political movement. The disposition Oakeshott calls “modern” is the temptation to assimilate civil association to enterprise association — to govern the state as if it were a project rather than a framework. Conservatism, on this account, is the resistance to that assimilation.

Oakeshott’s 1956 lecture “On Being Conservative” gives the most accessible statement: conservatism 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.” It is a temperament of attention to what is here, not nostalgia for what was.

Differing Positions

Friedrich Hayek admired Oakeshott’s critique of constructivist rationalism but treated his conservatism as too British and too quiescent — Hayek’s classical liberalism wanted a positive defence of market institutions Oakeshott was unwilling to mount. Oakeshott considered Hayek’s Road to Serfdom “a doctrine which, because it is itself a doctrine, makes nonsense of the conservative disposition.”

Leo Strauss read Oakeshott as a sceptic in the modern sense, lacking the philosophical seriousness of the ancients about the human good. Their disagreement is the post-war analytical-versus-Straussian split in conservative political theory.

Analytic political philosophers, particularly in the Rawlsian tradition, found Oakeshott’s distinction between practical and technical knowledge insufficiently rigorous and his civil/enterprise distinction insufficiently action-guiding. The rejoinder, sustained by his students Kenneth Minogue and Noël O’Sullivan and by recent commentators including Paul Franco, is that Oakeshott’s refusal to issue prescriptions is not a failure of his philosophy but the philosophical content of it.