Place of Michael Oakeshott in Contemporary Western and Non-Western Thought , livre ebook

The Place of Michael Oakeshott in Contemporary Western and Non-Western Thought
Edited by
Noël O’Sullivan
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Contributors
David Boucher FRHistS , Professor of Political Theory and International Relations, Cardiff University.
Chor-yung Cheung , Assistant Head and Senior Teaching Fellow, City University of Hong Kong.
Wendell John Coats Jr. , Professor of Government, Connecticut College, New London, CT.
Douglas J. Den Uyl , Vice President of Educational Programs at Liberty Fund, Inc.
Timothy Fuller , Lloyd E. Worner Distinguished Service Professor and Professor of Political Science, Colorado College.
Gurpreet Mahajan , Professor of Political Science, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
Terry Nardin , Professor of Political Science, National University of Singapore and also Yale-NUS College.
Edmund Neill FRHistS , Lecturer in Modern History, New College of the Humanities.
Noël O’Sullivan , Emeritus Professor of Political Philosophy, University of Hull.
Natalie Riendeau , PhD in Political Theory (Cardiff University), independent scholar and Senior Policy and Research Analyst for the Government of Canada.



1: Noël O’Sullivan
Introduction
Since Michael Oakeshott never courted public recognition in any sphere of life, he might have looked askance at being elevated to a special place on the academic pantheon by the recent publication of two ‘Companion to Oakeshott’ volumes. [1] Be that as it may, the event is an opportunity to ponder on the continuing rise of his star in both Western and non-Western contemporary thought. Although there are many possible explanations, it is intriguing to speculate about how Oakeshott himself might have assessed his contribution, had he been willing to entertain the topic. Perhaps the best hint is provided by a radio broadcast he gave on the central place of myth in every civilization (Oakeshott, 1975).
Although we usually think of civilization as something ‘solid and external’, Oakeshott said, in reality it is ‘a collective dream’, the substance of which ‘is a myth’ (Oakeshott, 1975, p. 150). By myth, he explained, he did not mean a mere flight of fancy but ‘an imaginative interpretation of human existence, the perception (not the solution) of the mystery of human life’ (Oakeshott, 1975, p. 150). As such, myths may be more or less coherent and profound.
Turning to the myth that inspires our own civilization, Oakeshott observed that although this ‘springs from many sources’ extending back to the ancient world, it is mainly indebted to medieval Christianity, ‘which no subsequent experience or reflection has succeeded in displacing from the minds of European peoples’ (Oakeshott, 1975, p. 151). According to this myth, which owes much to the teaching of St. Augustine (Oakeshott, 1975, p. 58), [2] the human race
sprang from the creative act of God, and was as perfect as its creator. But, by an original sin, mankind became separated from the sources of its happiness and peace. This sin was Pride, the perverse exaltation of the creature, by which man became a god to himself ... But while corrupted man pursued his blind desires, an enemy of himself and of his kind, divine grace set a limit to human self-destruction, and promised a restoration of the shattered order, an ultimate salvation. This, briefly, is the myth that gave coherence to the [European] dream. (Oakeshott, 1975, pp. 151–2)
In order to appreciate the strengths and weaknesses of a myth, Oakeshott said, it is necessary to turn to literature rather than philosophy, since philosophy lacks the gift of imagination that characterizes the most profound literary and poetic expressions of myth (Oakeshott, 1975, p. 151). The task of great literature, he emphasized, is ‘not to break the dream, but perpetually to recall it, to recreate it in each generation, and even to make more articulate the dream-powers of a people’. [3] On very rare occasions, however, philosophy itself may display such profound imaginative power that it rises to the level of literature, as Oakeshott believes was the case in Hobbes’s Leviathan (Oakeshott, 1975, p. 150). More usually, the philosophic achievement is not so much ‘an access of imaginative power’ as an ‘increase of knowledge’ which makes the myth more intelligible, but not more inspiring (Oakeshott, 1975, p. 151).
In the modern world, Oakeshott warned, the future of every myth is increasingly endangered by what he described as the ‘perverse genius’ of the scientist, who is not content to live within a dream or myth but tries instead to destroy it. Although the scientist likes to present this destructive aim positively as waking from the dream into the real world, he fails to realize that if he succeeds we should not only ‘find ourselves awake in a profound darkness, but [that] a dreadful insomnia would settle upon mankind, not less intolerable for being only a nightmare’. [4] In a subsequent retelling of the story of the Tower of Babel, Oakeshott expressed the fear that even if the modern myth survived the scientific project, it might nevertheless be reduced by a world bent upon prosperity to an impoverished instrumental vision of endless human gratification, accompanied by political ideologies which treat the rule of law as at best a device for implementing goals that provided little protection for individual freedom. [5] The misfortune of the modern world, in other words, is to have adopted what a sympathetic commentator has termed a ‘counterfeit myth’ which endangers civilization and individual freedom alike by deluding us about ‘the kind of community to which we belong and the sorts of persons we are’. [6] The delusion, in David Boucher’s summary of Oakeshott’s interpretation, is that we now think of society almost entirely as an economic enterprise, and of the activity of ruling as management. Our greatest need, accordingly, is to reformulate the counterfeit myth in a way compatible with freedom and its principal condition, viz. the rule of law and the maintenance of civil association.
From this standpoint, Oakeshott’s contribution to contemporary thought may be viewed as a sustained endeavour to revise the inherited European myth in ways that would make it both more coherent and more able to counter the dominance of the counterfeit version. [7] Before examining his principal revisions, however, the general nature of the link Oakeshott made between myth and politics must be noticed. This is explored in the chapters by Douglas Den Uyl and Natalie Riendeau.
For Den Uyl, Oakeshott’s primary concern is with myth in its specifically political form. In this form, Den Uyl argues, myth performs the vital task of grounding Oakeshott’s distinction between authority and power, which is fundamental not only to his ideal of civil association but to the entire modern tradition of theorizing about it from Hobbes onwards. Myth can perform this task because it is displayed above all in ‘moral imagination’, which is Oakeshott’s term, Den Uyl writes, for ‘a type of imagination that generates within us a sense of commitment or obligation, moral or otherwise ... because we find it compelling in itself’. For Oakeshott, Den Uyl concludes, obligation is thus the product of artifice expressed in moral imagining, and it is on the tenability of this contention that Oakeshott’s defence of the distinction between authority, which obligates, and power, which merely obliges, ultimately depends.
As Den Uyl observes, the main philosophical challenge to this distinction is Spinoza’s naturalistic philosophy, according to which authority is reducible to power. Examining Oakeshott’s response to this challenge, Den Uyl focuses on Oakeshott’s emphasis on the poetic aspect of moral imagining. All activity, including political activity, has a poetic dimension, but this is ignored by Spinoza’s desire to give an entirely scientific account of politics. But what, precisely, does Oakeshott mean by poetic activity? The poetic dimension arises, in Oakeshott’s own words, when ‘images in contemplation are merely present’ and ‘provoke neither speculation nor inquiry about the occasions or conditions of their appearing but only delight in their having appeared’. [8] In so far as the political has a poetic dimension, Den Uyl’s thesis is that this dimension is precisely what Oakeshott’s concept of political myth is intended to highlight. In short, for Oakeshott ‘the poetic in politics is myth’, and it is the existence of myth which grounds authority by making it irreducible to power. It is this fact which explains why Oakeshott believes that the characteristically modern tendency to purge the political of any poetic or mythical dimension has disturbing implications for the future of civil association, since it is only that dimension which prevents the gradual reduction of politics to an affair solely of power.
Den Uyl’s analysis of the part played by myth in underpinning the distinction between authority and power central to