The Philosophy of Conservatism
 | Roger Scruton, Ph.D. Ends, Means and Oakeshott Reading:
Oakeshott,
‘Rationalism in Politics and other Essays’.
Likewise
the term ‘ideology’ has, in Oakeshott’s usage, little to do either with Destutt
de Tracy’s original use of the tem, or with Marx’s adaptation. For Marx and
just about everyone who followed him down to Foucault and Deleuze, ideology is
to be contrasted with science. An ideological system of beliefs is one adopted
because it is functional in sustaining some given social order or system of
power relations. Scientific beliefs, by contrast, are adapted because they are
thought to be true, and whatever functionality they might have is the result of
their truth. For
Oakeshott an ideology is something like a system of goals, together with the
reasons for aiming at them and the techniques for achieving them. Rationalists
are addicted to ideologies, since they seem to justify giving priority to
‘reason’ (in a certain use of that term) over tradition, custom and experience.
For Oakeshott, however, an ideology is a kind of intellectual disease, a
riotous outgrowth of the mind, that comes about when thought is prised free
from reality, and begins to dwell on itself. The
Rationalist Heresy. As Oakeshott expresses it, the error of
rationalism is to confuse the ‘modes’ of experience, by applying in one realm
of experience (that of politics) a mode of thought that belongs to another
(that of business, or military campaigns, or). Clear goals, precise
techniques, and rules of practice make sense on the battlefield; but they
mutilate and undermine the world of politics, by forcing upon it an order that
it can never spontaneously adopt. There
is not much theory given in support of that claim: instead we have an intuitive
description of the rationalist character, and two important distinctions. The
first distinction is between technique and ‘practical knowledge’. Technique is
rule-guided, can be contained in a textbook and taught. You learn tehniques as
you learn recipes – and the cookery book is one of Oakeshott’s examples.
Practical knowledge, by contrast, is not rule-guided, and cannot be taught but
only imparted. You learn it by apprenticeship – in other words by following in
the footseps of the master, like Raphael in the studio of Perugino. It is fair
to say that this ‘practical knowledge’ is left under-described by Oakeshott,
and stands proxy for all those forms of knowledge and wisdom that might be
necessary for the proper conduct of human affairs but which cannot be reduced
to rules. The
second distinction is that between ideology and tradition. Again the first term
is more clearly characterised than the second. Ideologies are recipes – goals
to be achieved, techniques for achieving them, and philosophical reasons for
justifying them. The simplest examples in politics are the plans and schemes of
revolutionaries – though Oakeshott gives Robert Owen and Owenism as his
preferred example. The contrast with tradition is not clearly drawn: sometimes
it is experience, or reality or custom that is being singled out as the
contrasting term. Still,
we can grasp what Oakeshott is getting at – namely his own version of the (by
now, I hope, familiar) epistemological argument: that the knowledge required
for successful political practice (a) cannot be contained in a plan and (b) is
destroyed by the attempt to provide one. Oakeshott’s additions to this argument
are quite adventurous – certainly more adventurous than anything in Burke. For
example, the assertion that ‘practical knowledge’ cannot be taught or learned
but only imparted – where that means
something like ‘transferred through familiarity and example’ – is a striking
claim, reminiscent of the ancient doctrine that virtue can be acquired only by mimesis. Indeed, in so far as one can
find a precedent for Oakeshott’s ‘practical knowledge’ it is something like
Aristotle’s practical wisdom or sophrosune
– the wisdom that resides in the harmonious exercise of virtue. Here
it is worth pointing out that Oakshott’s Rationalism
in Politics appeared after the Second World War and was heavily influenced
by his experience of that war. There is a very important historical point to be
made about twentieth-century wars, and indeed all wars since those launched by
the French Revolution, which is that they are fought by conscripts. The entire body of citizens is involved in a modern
war, either as combatants or as targets. And this means that the entire body of
citizens has to be brought under some kind of central quasi-military command if
the war is to be won. Modern warfare requires the socialist state, or something
like it; and when the weary population elects its first peace-time government
it is on the unspoken assumption that the military order on which it has come
to depend will remain in place, taking charge of all those things which were
once ordered by the ‘invisible hand’. Hence, to the great surprise of many
patriots, the British people elected a Labour government in 1945,
notwithstanding the fact that Churchill was leader of the Conservative Party. And
the post-war intellectual establishment was more or less uniformly socialist in
tendency. Harold Laski had become chair of political thought at the London
School of Economics, actively recruiting the new generation of socialist
political scientists. However, he encountered internal opposition in the
presence, at LSE, of two Viennese refugees, Popper and Hayek, both of whom
succeeded in producing anti-socialist disciples; so it was not too surprising
that Oakeshott succeeded Laski on the latter’s retirement. Henceforth LSE,
which had been the core of the left establishment, shifted to the right. Hayek,
Popper and Oakeshott were all in the business of articulating an
anti-collectivist philosophy, at a time when, on account of the war,
collectivism had become a kind of background assumption in political practice. Civil
Association. In subsequent writings, notably On Human Conduct, Oakeshott develops
another distinction that he regards as vital for the understanding of political
order – that between enterprise association and civil association, as he calls
it. Again, the negative term of the distinction is much clearer than the
positive. An enterprise association is one entered into and maintained for some
independent purpose – as in a business partnership. In such an association the
terms are justified in terms of the purpose served, and the rules are to be
understood as techniques: prescriptions which help to advance the purpose
intended. The purpose provides a single and overarching criterion in terms of which
to assess the value of any activity and the utility of any particular rule. Now,
on Oakeshott’s view, it is the great error of socialism, and also of the
managerial kind of conservatism, to think of political order as a kind of
enterprise association. Whatever the goal – be it equality, social justice, the
instigation of the five-year plan, economic growth, or whatever – an enterprise
association on this scale will be quite incompatible with the kind of order
demanded by political coexistence. It will not provide the core parameters of
citizenship, of free association, of negotiation and the free exercise of
individual choice; everything will be subservient to the goal, which will exert
its oppressive influence over every aspect of social life. Furthermore, for
reasons seplled out in the criticism of rationalism in politics (but rather
better spelled out in Burke’s criticism of
the Revolutionary conception of natural rights as the goal of government
and Hayek’s criticism of the tyranny of the plan) the goal will prove incapable
of realisation – always present, never achieved, a standing rebuke to the
renewable failure of society, kept alive only by the punishment of the citizens
for their inability to achieve it. Now
we probably have little difficulty in accepting that as a criticism of
communist-style collectivism, of which it is an accurate portrait. But
Oakeshott’s target was not communism, except tangentially. He was far more
concerned with tendencies that he discerned within Western democracies: tendencies
to replace civil association, as he called it, with some kind of managerial,
technocratic, or at any rate essentially goal-directed substitute. The error
here is manifest, for example, in the field of education. A manager, brought in
to advise an educational establishment, will first ask ‘what is its purpose?’
And he will not be satisfied with the obvious, and only, reply, which is
‘education’. For he will want to know ‘what is the purpose of that?’ To say
that it has no purpose, other than itself, is to defeat the managerial
enterprise, which is to make the educational institution more efficient, better at providing the goods that it was
established to provide. So the manager will still want to know: what are those goods? The socialist might
respond by saying that the purpose of education is to create equality, by
extending new opportunities to the working class. The manager then can get to
work on shaping the school accordingly: equality is the goal, and the school is
a means to achieving it. The result of this, as we know, is a process of
‘dumbing down’, the first casualty of which is education. Ditto for the other
fashionable goals, such as economic efficiency, multicultural inclusiveness,
national identity, etc. All such causes direct our attention away from the
fundamental truth, that the purpose of education is itself, that it is an end and not a means, and that schools
must therefore shape their curriculum and their methods accordingly, as ways of
making that end into a present reality. Not
surprisingly it is difficult to say what that involves. To say that something
is not a means is easy, just as it is easy to criticize those who treat as a
means what is not a means at all. But to
describe something as an end, and to say what is involved in so treating it, is
always difficult. All attempts to vindicate such a description seem to have a
fatal tendency to undermine themselves, to show that the thing alleged to be an
end is really a means after all. This is one reason why Oakeshott’s description
of ‘civil association’ is so much less clear than his criticism of the view
that political order is really a kind of enlarged enterprise association. Civil
association is not association for a
purpose, not even for the purpose of civil association. It lies in an
important sense beyond purpose, in a
realm of pure personal fulfilment, like love. If someone asks ‘what is the
purpose of love?’ you will know that he does not understand what he is talking
about. Of course, from the sociological point of view, love has a function: it is one part of the social
cement on which societies depend for their survival. But it doesn’t have a
purpose: it is beyond purpose, a
feature of the ‘kingdom of ends’, to use the Kantian language. To say that you
love for the sake of love is wrong too: that describes a narcissistic
perversion of love, not the thing itself. Ends,
means and friendship. Oakeshott’s discussion takes us back to
Aristotle’s account of friendship. For Aristotle political order should be
conceived on the model of friendship: the mutual affection that binds people
together so that they to a certain measure share each other’s fate. But
Aristotle disinguished three kinds of friendship: the friendship of pleasure,
the friendship of utility and the friendship of virtue, corresponding to a
threefold division among practical reasons. (Three kinds of answer to the
question: ‘Why do that?’.) A friendship of utility, like a business
partnership, is dominated by a common purpose, and permeated by ‘instrumental
reasoning’, as someone like Habermas would put it. This kind of friendship
corresponds to Oakeshott’s enterprise association, and was regarded by
Aristotle as in some way an incomplete or unfulfilled form of friendship. The
fulfilled kind occurs between virtuous people, who love each other for their
virtues. This is exaggerated, of course, and would be better put in the Kantian
idiom, by saying that fulfilled friendship exists between people who appreciate
each other for what they are, (as ‘ends in themselves’), and not for what they
do or produce. But what they are is also what they give to the other in
friendship. Put in a more Christian way: fulfilled friendship occurs between
people who give to each other, and
who do not seek a return. The return comes only because they do not seek it,
since it comes in the form of a gift. There is a complex phenomenology here,
but the logic of the point is not, I think, difficult to grasp. Fulfilled
friendship comes about only between people who not treat each other instrumentally. And the benefit of such
a friendship is available only to the person who does not pursue it – who
values his friend for his own sake, and not as a means to the benefits
attendant on the friendship. That,
I think, is the way in which Oakeshott is envisaging civil association. Those
joined in a civil association receive an enormous benefit from their membership
– all the benefits that Hegel summarizes in his theory of civil society,
including the benefits of shared citizenship under a single rule of law, which
provides the all-surrounding guarantee of safety and civil order. However, they
do not associate for the purpose of
these benefits, for the reason that these benefits come about only as the
by-product of civil association and not as its goal. If ever these benefits
should become the purpose (as in a ‘social contract’) then they would
disappear. They would disappear because the civil association would collapse
into an association of another kind – not an enterprise association, exactly,
but nevertheless something approaching to Philip Bobbitt’s ‘market state’ (The Shield of Achilles). In such an
association the bond of civil society would be absent: each would be ‘in it for
what he can get’: the important attitudes which hold society together (public spirit,
self-sacrifice, the benevolence which, worked upon by convention, produces,
according to Hume, the ‘artificial virtue’ of justice) would all be at risk,
subdued by the kind of instrumental reasoning that fails to see the point of
them. (To see how the details of the argument might go, we might try to develop
the parallel with friendship step by step; and it is fruitful to consider
Hume’s thoughts about justice too. For Hume social order comes about only
because we find reasons other than self-love for joining with our neighbours –
in other words, only when we leave purely contractual reasoning behind.) Now
this does not mean that civil association is an ‘end in itself’ – whatever that
does mean in this context. It means
only that it must not be instrumentalised, not even in relation to the benefits
that it brings. As with friendship, if we treat civil association as a means to
the benefits that it confers on us, then we undermine the social relations from
which those benefits flow. We enjoy
those benefits, as we enjoy love and friendship; but our ability to do so is
predicated on our ability to give, as
people give in convivial company, in conversation, in a holiday gathering, or
when making music together. Indeed, in several of his later writings, Oakeshott
seems to adopt conversation as his preferred model of a non-instrumental
association, and to imply that civil association is in some way composed of
such innocent activities, in which people are at ease with each other,
receiving benefits only because their purpose is to confer them. This is a very
attractive model of society – who would not opt for it if he could? But of
course it seems to overlook exactly what Hegel was drawing attention to, when
he distinguished civil society from state. The joys of civil society are
possible, Hegel argued, only if civil society is ‘transcended’ (aufgehoben) into the state – in other
words into the sphere of law, which imposes its coercive order on our
relations, and demands obedience, even from those who see no reason to obey. It
was precisely in order to justify this kind of coercion that theorists of the
social contract attempted to trace the origins of the state to the citizens’
consent. Even
so, we might accept that there is an important point underlying Oakeshott’s
idea, and one that engages with some of the fundamental intuitions of modern
conservatism. The point is this: political obligation is non-defeasible, an
absolute obligation which we neither undertook nor can easily escape from. It
does not have the character of the normal contractual obligations of the
marketplace, and cannot be understood in instrumental terms. Moreover, we come
to accept it alongside many other
equally non-instrumental obligations, such as those of family, erotic love,
conversation, club and team – all of which flesh out the obligations of
citizenship with the content of civility.
All these relations are undermined or corrupted by instrumental reasoning, and
instrumental ways of thinking (whether socialist or capitalist, it should be
added) are the natural enemies of civility in all its forms. They stand to
civil association as a functionalist factory stands to a Gothic cathedral or
Walmart to Princeton University. In
this way we can see Oakeshott’s account as picking up something that Burke was
referring to, when he traced the obligations of civil society to the ‘little
platoons’ which are our apprenticeship in social affection. And the purpose in
both cases is to distinguish peaceful forms of association from belligerent
forms. The easiest form of association to create and to understand is that of
the army, united by a chain of command, and dedicated to the single purpose of
victory over enemies. All collectivist projects end (even if they don’t begin)
as bands of ‘citizens on the march’, as Burke pointed out in his analysis of
the French revolution (which was held together, according to Burke, by an
‘armed doctrine’). The hardest form of association to create is one that has no
single chain of command, which is protected by the offices and laws of a
peaceful state, and which is dedicated to the mutual accomodation and
well-being of its citizens. In such a state belligerence is marginalized in
favour of peaceful associations. And these associations are not merely peaceful
in the way that herds are peaceful. They give a moral content to the idea of peace, as the forum in which
people enjoy each other. Friendship is not their purpose: it is the way in
which they are.
Readers of Oakeshott often complain about a
certain Bloomsbury-ish attitude to ordinary people in his prose: a sense that,
deep down, ordinary people ought to be entertaining themselves with Socratic
conversations, gentle affairs, and dinner parties. The harshness of ordinary
life, the business of survival in times of need, the distresses of failure,
jealousy, resentment and so on: all this sits uneasily with the ‘civil
association’ that Oakeshott advocates – even though, as an acknowledged expert
on Hobbes, Oakeshott was familiar with the argument from human nature in the
raw. Among
the features of our social life that are seldom mentioned by Oakeshott, by no
means the least important is religion. Where does this fit in to his kind of
conservative vision, or to any conservative vision for that matter? This question
takes us back to a consideration of the Enlightenment, and the vew of culture
that emerged from it. Oakeshott’s theory of civil association is downstream
from, and distantly related to, Schiller’s argument in Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, which I discussed in the
class on culture. Both are looking for a way of separating activities that are
ends in themselves from activities that are means to some external end; and
both hold that our social and political nature is fulfilled by the first kind
of activity but not by the second. For Schiller this meant that aesthetic
education, as he called it – in other words culture in its singular meaning –
is a necessary preparation for the life of society. And Oakeshott too, in one
essay (The Voice of Poetry in the
Conversation of Mankind) seems to be consciously echoing Schiller’s
romantic effort to ‘save the appearances’ of community, through its aesthetic
epitaph. But we should remember that Schiller’s Letters, while explicitly Kantian in inspiration, were also in part
a reaction to the Enlightenment view of religion. God had retreated from the
world; the rituals and texts in which he had made his presence known had lost
their authority; and with the retreat of religion had come a loss of the sense of
intrinsic value – the sense that attaches to ritual and sacred texts, to acts
of worship and the ‘life in obedience’ that religion demands. And Schiller
looked to culture in order to recapture that sense of intrinsic value. In a way
Oakeshott’s encomium to civil association is attempting something similar –
though with far less conscious recognition of the fact that, what is being
reconstructed here, is an outlook that, in less self-conscious times, is the
child of religion. The
point that principally needs to be made here is that the whole conflict between
liberalism and conservatism (a conflict that lies deeper than that between
either of them and the various socialisms that have recently clouded human
vision) is, in the end, a conflict that is rooted in religion. Liberalism
created the Enlightenment; conservatism tried to undo it – to fill this
unnaturally illuminated space with soothing shadows. As children of the
Enlightenment, Burke, Hegel and de Maistre were conscious of its anti-religious
impulse, and all reacted against this. Only Maistre reacted with a
whole-hearted commitment to the old religion, though it was a commitment
infused with irony and disdain. Burke’s attitude was one of melancholy
affirmation of the contours of the Christian faith, while avoiding any defence
of the theology; Hegel’s attitude too was essentially anthropological, seeing
in the Christian vision an extended metaphor of man’s spiritual journey, which
could be ‘cashed out’ in terms of the institutions and laws of civic life. In
contrast the attitude of the liberal has been to reconstruct the entire
underpinning of social order without reference to religion – to relegate
religion to the sphere of private choice, while founding political obligation
and the rule of law on purely secular principles that have no religious
endorsement. This is clear enough in Locke’s social contract, and in the
writings of Rousseau. But it becomes even clearer in the writings of modern
liberals. For Rawls religion belongs, if at all, in that sphere of ‘conceptions
of the good’ which have to be hidden behind the veil of ignorance, when it
comes to choosing the basic structure of social distribution and the
constitutional provisions which offer each of us the guarantees associated with
social membership. For Dworkin religion appears as a mere vestige of the old
order, a way of protecting the irrational and obstructive attitudes of the
rednecks whom the Constitution is designed to subdue. In his writings on
abortion, for example, Dworkin tries to borrow the religious value of the
sacred, to give it a universal and secular content, and then to offer the
‘pro-choice’ camp the benefit of the belief that the sovereign choice of a
woman in matters of reproductive life is something that it is legitimate to regard
as sacred. This is a long way from the religious view, of course: but it is a
strong affirmation of the liberal conception that religion, after all, is not
what real disputes in politics are about. Even if religious concepts seem to
capture the ideas of intrinsic worth over which we are contending, they can be
voided of all religious connotation and made available to the liberal in their
acceptable and sanitised versions. Internal
and External Perspectives. In considering the place of religion in
political life it is necessary to distinguish the internal from the external
perspective. Someone can believe that religion is necessary to human
communities, can even offer his endorsement to one particular form of it,
without having any religious belief of his own. Such an ‘external’ perspective,
which sees religion from outside, as a social phenomenon with costs and
benefits of its own, is common among conservatives – especially among
conservative anthropologists like Sir Henry Maine and Sir James Frazer. It goes
hand-in-hand with the kind of broad utilitarian picture that we associate with
Hume, though he himself was indifferent to the fate of religion as he knew it.
From the internal perspective, however, religion offers a stark choice: either
believe or disbelieve. And religious belief is not like scientific belief, in
leaving room for doubt and scepticism: it is not the conclusion of an argument,
but the result of upbringing or conversion, an existential predicament, whose
main result is membership within the
religious community. Rituals, sacred words, sacred texts and observances are
all to be performed meticulously: get them wrong and you fall out of
‘communion’ with the believers, and the consequences of this can be lethal.
This is an immensely puzzling yet wholly familiar feature of religions, and
points to the role of religion in overcoming ‘difference’, and binding people
to a common posture of obedience. The more mysterious and inexplicable the
ritual, the more powerfully does it command us to join: for our joining then shows our submission to something
greater than ourselves, something that we do not understand because it is
literally unintelligible. That is why we make pilgrimages to Mecca, and do all
the weird things there required of us. But this also means that religion is
ambivalently connected to the political realm. If it is providing the core
experience of social membership, what room is there for political organization, and how can politics compete with it? If,
on the other hand, a community is organized politically, what room is there for
religion among its members, and how can the absolute commandments of religion
be reconciled with the compromises required by political order? These
questions are of concern equally to liberals and conservatives, especially now.
Roughly speaking there is an Enlightenment consensus within Western
communities, which is shared by liberals and conservatives, and which holds
that religious freedom is the premise of political order. Unless each citizen
is free to worship as his conscience directs, or not to worship at all, then
there is not a truly political order,
but order of another kind, theocratic or totalitarian. (It is important to see
that the communist and fascist forms of totalitarianism are also derogations
from political order, which, even if atheistical, are also insisting on a kind
of religious rather than political unity among their subjects – unity founded
in a shared observance, and a forbidding of the fundamental questions. Hence
the enraged pursuit of heretics in communist societies.) The essence of
politial order is that it is negotiated, founded in compromises, based in
membership of another kind from that implied by religious observance – the kind
for which ‘citizenship’ is the name. Here is a quote from my book The West and the Rest:
A similar conflict informs the Oresteia of Aeschylus, in which a succession of religious murders, beginning with Agamemnon’s ritual sacrifice of his daughter, lead at last to the terrifying persecution of Orestes by the furies. The gods demand the murders; the gods also punish them. Religion binds the house of Atreus, but in dilemmas that it does not resolve. Resolution comes at last only when judgement is handed over to the city, personified in Athena. In the political order, we are led to understand, justice replaces vengeance, and negotiated solutions abolish absolute commands. The message of the Oresteia resounds down the centuries of Western civilisation: it is through politics, not religion, that peace is secured. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord; but justice, says the City, is mine. The Greek tragedians wrote at the beginning of Western civilisation. But their world is continuous with our world. Their law is the law of the city, in which political decisions are arrived at by discussion, participation and dissent. It was in the context of the Greek city-state that political philosophy began, and the great questions of justice, authority and the constitution are discussed by Plato and Aristotle in terms that are current today.’
If
civil association is sufficient in itself to foster intrinsic values and
life-enhancing goals, then it has effectively taken over the traditional role
of religion, which can exist henceforth merely as a support for those who need
that kind of thing. This is the view that seems to be emerging in the tradition
that begins with Schiller and ends with Oakeshott. Their vision differs from
the usual socialist position in recognizing the purposeless, the intrinsically
meaningful, and the ‘end in itself’ as the aim of political order, and in
marginalising all utilitarian thinking. And it differs from the usual liberal
position in recognizing limits to state action in the formation of civil
association. In all probability it is a position incompatible with the normal
liberal ideas of ‘social justice’, for reasons given in our class on justice.
Its Aristotelian emphasis on friendship sets it apart from the nanny state, and
delivers a vision of human society in which individual virtue, autonomous
institutions and educational excellence play a role of the kind that is not
clearly acknowledge in modern liberalism. Of course, you could say that classical liberalism is not so very
different in these matters, and that is so. But of course, classical liberalism
and conservatism co-exist in thinkers like Burke, Smith and Hume, and it is
only in recent times, following J.S. Mill, that liberalism has taken its statist
direction. The
external perspective may still contain a strong endorsement of religion, as
providing some of the background of socialization on which even the most
secular constitution may need to draw: this is the view that you find in Burke
and Disraeli, for example, and maybe even Maistre. But this endorsement raises
a serious question of how, exactly, the state should respond to the demands of
religion and also to the demands of those who attack it. We see the conflicts
here in the rival interpretations of the ‘no establishment’ clause in the
Firest Amendment – conflicts between conservatives, who believe that this
clause does not exclude religion from public life, and who believe that the
state should acknowledge, even if it does not impose, the demands of religion,
and liberals who take the clause to authorize a policy of complete and radical
secularization. (We have discussed this earlier in the course.) This
is the point where I propose to leave off, since it connects to the problem of
constitutions, and the topics introduced under this heading by Maistre. |