RG

IN CONTEXT

IDEOLOGY

Conservatism

FOCUS

Practical experience

BEFORE

1532 Machiavelli’s The Prince analyzes the usually violent means by which men seize, retain, and lose political power.

1689 Britain’s Bill of Rights limits the monarchy’s powers.

1848 Marx and Engels publish the Communist Manifesto, which Oakeshott believes is used unthinkingly as a “rule book” for political action.

AFTER

1975 In Cambodia, Pol Pot proclaims “Year Zero,” erasing history. His Maoist regime kills 2 million people in 3 years.

1997 China’s principle of “One Country, Two Systems” allows for Hong Kong’s free-market economy after Britain returns the territory to China.

The political extremism that engulfed much of the world in the 20th century, with the rise of Hitler in Germany, Stalin in Russia, and Mao in China, stirred Michael Oakeshott’s career-long investigation into the nature of political ideologies and their impact on the lives of nations. He considered that Marxist and fascist leaders had seized on the thought of political theorists like “an infection,” with disastrous consequences for millions. Oakeshott named this contagious disease “rationalism.”

RG

Tracing the emergence of British parliamentary institutions to the “least rationalistic period of politics—the Middle Ages,” Oakeshott explained that in Britain, Parliament had not developed following a rationalist or ideological order. Rather, the imperative to limit political power and protect against tyranny acted as a deterrent, stabilizing Britain against the rationalist absolutisms that gripped Europe.

"In political activity, then, men sail on a boundless and bottomless sea."

Michael Oakeshott

Fixed beliefs

Oakeshott saw rationalism in politics as a fog obscuring the real-life, day-to-day practicalities that all politicians and parties must address. The rationalist’s actions are a response to his fixed theoretical beliefs rather than to objective or “practical” experience. He must memorize a rule book, such as Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto, before he can navigate the waters in which he finds himself, and so he is constantly detached from reality, operating through an ideological fog of abstract theories. Oakeshott declared that “men sail a boundless and bottomless sea”—meaning that the world is hard to fathom and that attempts to make sense of society’s behavior inevitably distort and simplify the facts. He was wary of ideologies, seeing them as abstract, fixed beliefs that cannot explain what is inexplicable. Allergic to uncertainty, they convert complex situations into simple formulas. The rationalist politician’s impulse is to act from within the “authority of his own reason”—the only authority he recognizes. He acts as though he understands the world and can see how it should be changed. It is very dangerous in politics, Oakeshott believed, to act according to an artificial ideology rather than real experience of government. Practical knowledge is the best guide and ideology is false knowledge.

  Although Oakeshott was known as a conservative theorist, and his thinking has been appropriated by elements of modern-day conservatism, this is an ideological label that he did not recognize, and he did not pledge public support for conservative political parties.

RG

Oakeshott likened political life to a ship on rough seas. Predicting exactly how the waves will form is impossible, so negotiating the storms requires experience.

MICHAEL OAKESHOTT

Michael Oakeshott was born in London in 1901 to a civil servant and a former nurse. He studied history at the University of Cambridge, graduating in 1925. He remained in academia for the next half century, barring his covert role in World War II when he served with British intelligence as part of the “Phantom” reconnaissance unit in Belgium and France.

  Oakeshott taught at both Cambridge and Oxford universities, after which he moved to the London School of Economics and was made Professor of Political Science. He published widely on the philosophy of history, religion, aesthetics, and law as well as politics. His influence on Conservative party politics in Britain led Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to put him forward for knighthood, which he declined, not seeing his work as political in nature. He retired in 1968, and died in 1990.

Key works

1933 Experience and Its Modes

1962 Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays

1975 On Human Conduct

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