The two men could not have been more different: Laski was a Marxist thinker and a life-long apologist for socialism; Oakeshott was an important conservative political philosopher. In this age of Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, an unfettered EPA, Common Core, the exponential growth of government regulations, ad nauseum , this essay deserves to be read widely a pdf copy of the essay is available here.
It is a short, brilliant critique of the mode of thought that now dominates leftist thinking in America and, sadly, the kind of thinking that animates far too many politicians who call themselves conservatives. Early in the essay, Oakeshott makes it clear that he holds no brief against rational thought or against making decisions, political and otherwise, based on rational analysis focused on the prudential process of weighing facts and options.
Oakeshott attacks the narrowness of those who believe if they do or pretend to do only that kind of analysis, their job is done. The greatest flaw, Oakeshott, argues, of this kind of rationalism that its proponents are unwilling to consider anything else, such as tradition, past practice, or cultural habits.
The Rationalist convinces himself that he stands outside politics, that like Sergeant Joe Friday, he is interested only in the facts. But he also loves innovation as an end in itself:. To the Rationalist, nothing is of value merely because it exists and certainly not because it has existed for many generations , familiarity has no worth, and nothing is to be left standing for want of scrutiny.
To patch up, to repair that is, to do anything which requires a patient knowledge of the material , he regards as waste of time: and he always prefers the invention of a new device to making use of a current and well-tried expedient.
It will be evident that this is not the authentic Tory doctrine, for it is silent on social hierarchy, traditional morality, and the divine right of kings. Professor Oakeshott indeed, like a true Whig, is indifferent to monarchy save insofar as it keeps things stable and vaguely critical of Christian morality.
The true focus of its sentiment is individualism, i. There are indeed many Burkean passages to be found in Oakeshott, e. Tocqueville, Burckhardt and Acton, when the character of modern collectivism was in process of being revealed. It is important that this issue should be felt , not argued. In an earlier essay Professor Oakeshott showed himself suspicious of F. Hayek, a liberal in the Whig tradition, because his cast of mind is rationalist.
Now this mode of reasoning is available to conservative liberals only at the cost of some unpopularity. It must be a disappointment to him that faith in traditional ways of life has not quite managed to keep these troublesome innovations out. But true or not, it is not a doctrine that can be of the slightest use to Time magazine or Senator Gold-water.
It represents the politics of the felt need interpreted with the aid of an ideology. And it is not surprising that it should have become one of the sacred documents of the politics of Rationalism, and, together with the similar documents of the French Revolution, the inspiration and pattern of many later adventures in the rationalist reconstruction of society.
Toryism, even of the modified Burkean kind, simply will not take root anywhere save in English soil. It may be said that this is irrelevant: what counts is whether a statement is true, not whether it is popular. Then again consider the filiation of ideas from the English Revolution good to the American Revolution bad.
True, a few years later Burke, in his alarm over what was happening in France, also appealed to Natural Law, but then his deductions were conservative and therefore acceptable, whereas the conclusions drawn by the American and French radicals were subversive of the existing order, and thus reprehensible. Click here to sign up. Download Free PDF. Oakeshott s Exploration of Modern Rationalism Daniel Vojcak. A short summary of this paper.
Oakeshott s Exploration of Modern Rationalism. The arts, child rearing, and business management were to be revolutionized according to rationalist precepts. In architecture and city planning, rationalism would sweep away that unnecessary clutter of old prejudices that restrained traditional architecture and customary urban organization and build the modern, functional buildings and communities that people truly needed.
And, with the Soviet Union seen as setting the example, society as a whole was to be transformed into a utopia by tossing aside all attachment to atavistic customs and ancient moral relics and proceeding to design social affairs from first principles. See, for instance, Callahan and Ikeda, , for an examination of the deleterious effects of rationalism on urban planning, or Scott, , for the negative outcomes of rationalist agriculture.
But since then, the many disappointing outcomes of the rationalist program have considerably dimmed its popularity. To browse Academia.
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