The Intellectual Legacy of Michael Oakeshott

 by Bob Cheeks  

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The essays presented in The Intellectual Legacy of Michael Oakeshott take the reader on a delightful journey of the mind.

The Intellectual Legacy of Michael Oakeshott
Edited by Corey Abel and Timothy Fuller
Published by Imprint Academic, UK
Hdbk, 327 pgs., index
ISBN: 1-84540-009-7

THE FEW ASSUME TO BE THE DEPUTIES, BUT THEY
ARE OFTEN ONLY THE DESPOILERS OF THE MANY.
– Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of History, 1832

Michael Oakeshott typified the archetypal philosopher in that he disdained the public light, finding solace in academia and in conversation. In fact, Oakeshott considered conversation to be “the most distinctive feature of being human.” He was a skeptic and an idealist who defined an inherent tension and error in the premise, happily promulgated by the lesser and more pretentious lights of modernity, that human activity could be supervised by an omnipresent scientism whose primary objective was the utopian order.

The British publishing house, Imprint Academic, has taken on the task of re-publishing a number of Oakeshott’s works as well as several Oakeshottian criticisms in their British Idealist Studies. Among these works is the aforementioned, The Intellectual Legacy of Michael Oakeshott. This particular book is an eclectic collection of essays gathered from the first two international conferences of the Michael Oakeshott Association (2001 and 2003) submitted by learned academics. The collection is divided into three sections: Oakeshott and the Ancients, Oakeshott and the Moderns, and Oakeshott Today. The criticisms clearly illustrate the wide spectrum of philosophical erudition found in Oakeshott’s work.

In the first essay, "Oakeshott and Plato: A Philosophical Conversation," the author, Dr. Debra Candreva, discusses Plato’s penchant for interjecting “competing, and often, conflicting, viewpoints.” Oakeshott’s rejection of Plato’s dogmatic reasoning is based on his similar rejection of rationalism, i.e. the “philosophical untenable” existence of abstract ideals, as well as the failure of Plato’s proofs. Dr. Canderva points out a unique aspect of Oakeshott’s wisdom, that Oakeshott did not so much seek the ephemeral “truth,” but rather, as a philosopher, he sought to “enlighten,” to “cultivate an attitude and an aptitude for the pursuit of clarity in the future.” Dr. Canderva’s revelation provides a basis for understanding Oakeshott’s skepticism as well as his idealism.

In his essay, "Michael Oakeshott and the Elusive Identity of the Rule of Law," Buffalo University professor Richard Friedman presents a classical analysis of Oakeshott’s conceptualization of the law. He explores, in some depth and detail, Oakeshott’s inquiry into the “dichotomy between the non-instrumental and instrumental rule and the analysis of the modern sovereign state as an ambiguous combination of civil and enterprise associations.” Friedman points out that the fly in the juridical ointment is the question of sovereignty. Eloquently expressing a decided perspicuity, Dr. Friedman writes, “The modern concept of the state is a ‘masterpiece of neutrality’ because association in recognition of sovereign authority is not necessarily association under the rule of law.” One may argue that the much-heralded “rule of law” has degenerated into a neurotic codification ably scribed by the nomenklatura in order to justify anything they seek to justify. Sovereignty, which in the distant past resided in God’s revelation, is at best “imperfectly specified” and that leads, of course, to discordance.

Dr. Kenneth Minogue, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the London School of Economics, in his essay "Oakeshott: Rationalism Revisited," argues that the one point Oakeshott was adamant about was rationalism and its effects on modernity. Minogue aptly defines rationalism as “the deliberate attempt to catch happiness.” It is the reductio ad absurdum of all modes of experience into the tar pit of the practical. This mental aberration, Dr. Minogue points out, is “progressive,” always and everywhere expanding: politics, government, education, and morality. None of the conditions of mankind have been spared this sophistry; all have been infected with this pernicious and debilitating virus, a point on which the good professor ably elucidates.

In his essay, "Rationalism in Politics and Cognitive Science," Keith Sutherland, the editor of the Journal of Consciousness Studies and publisher of the History of Political Thought and Polis: The Journal of the Society for Greek Political Thought, posits the argument that the “Early indications are that the abstract rationalism of cognitive science may need to be drastically modified by the new emphasis on embodiment, evolution and emotion…” and he examines “some of the parallels between this and Oakeshott’s attack on ‘rationalism’ in politics.”

Sutherland’s essay is wonderfully presented, erudite, and objective. His conclusion, while it sums up his deliberations, also bears witness to a certain wisdom:

At the heart of ‘modern Rationalism’ is the preoccupation with the quest for certainty — and this can be traced back to the work of Bacon and Descartes. However, contemporary science has thrown in the towel on this quixotic project- — Descartes’ first critic, Pascal, was right all along. Our best understanding of the physical world, quantum theory, has probability at its very core, the firing of a nerve cell is equally probabilistic and the rapid development of nonlinear dynamics has made even the calculation of probabilities fraught with problems. In the light of all this, a philosophical system with ‘certainty’ as its starting point and its goal is beginning to look like a quaint anachronism.

When Oakeshott wrote his famous essay, he was out of line with the emerging paradigm of cognitive science, not to mention the general ‘progressive’ zeitgeist of the post-war corporatist-collectivist consensus. However, rather than being a relic of an age of fusty idealist philosophy, Oakeshott was a prophet before his time. Students from a wide variety of disciplines who first turn to his work at the start of the twenty-first century are likely to be surprised by its freshness and relevancy.

The essays presented in The Intellectual Legacy of Michael Oakeshott take the reader on a delightful journey of the mind. They reveal with clarity and circumspection the profound genius of a humble philosopher whose thought transcended his brilliant critique of� ‘Rationalism’ and his seminal “treatment of civil associations.” The book is must reading for anyone interested in philosophical studies,� who understands that “human experience is inescapably conditional.”

The Intellectual Legacy of Michael Oakeshott is available on� Amazon.com.

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