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Conserving Politics: Michael Oakeshott and Political Theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Extract

THE CONVERSATION (AS MICHAEL OAKESHOTT WOULD CALL IT) THAT is political theory finds itself these days starved for interlocutors. There are talkers aplenty, but they do little listening and pursue their several idioms not for the pleasure of language but in order to urge positions and promote interests. Philosophers like Rawls and Nozick join the conversation in order to demonstrate, thanks to the irrefutable logical foundations they presume to discover for justice, how most effectively to conclude it. Liberal sce tics like Karl Popper trust talk no more than philosophy, and opt for straightforward problem-solving. For Marxists, conversation can only obscure or reveal action – and action is where (as Marxism's American roponents might put it) the action is. In each of these modes of discourse, the goal is advocacy, certainty, justification – a resolution of, not a conversation about political issues. Moreover, as if the ranks of conversationalists were not already decimated, death has, in the last year or two, silenced the voices of three giants: John Plamenatz, Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt.

Type
Original Article
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1976

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References

page 447 note 1 All references will be given parenthetically; works by Oakeshott cited, and the abbreviations used for them, are as follows: On Human Conduct, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975, cited as OHC, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, New York: Basic Books, 1962; cited as RinP; Experience and Its Modes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933, cited as EaIM. Oakeshott's several essays on Hobbes have now been collected in a volume entitled Hobbes on Civil Association, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975, not cited here