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Michael Oakeshott (1901–1990)

Oakeshott argued that the defining error of modern political thought is rationalism — the belief that all knowledge can be made explicit, codified in rules, and applied universally. Against this he set a distinction between technical knowledge (what can be stated in principles) and practical knowledge (what exists only in practice and cannot be fully articulated). A cook follows a recipe; a good cook knows when to depart from it — and that second kind of knowing cannot be reduced to the first. The distinction runs through all of Oakeshott’s work: from his early philosophy of experience, through his critique of rationalism in politics, to his mature account of civil association as a form of human relationship defined by shared rules rather than shared purposes. Knowledge, for Oakeshott, is always richer than any formulation of it — and the attempt to govern by formulation alone is the rationalist error.

Life

Born 11 December 1901 in Chelsfield, Kent, England. His father was a civil servant and Fabian socialist. Educated at St George’s School, Harpenden, then Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge (BA in history, 1923). Studied in Germany at Marburg and Tübingen (1923–24), where he encountered Hegel’s philosophy of history and the tradition of German idealism that would shape his early work.

Fellow and lecturer in history at Gonville and Caius (1929–49). Served in the British Army during the Second World War, in the intelligence section of Phantom (GHQ Liaison Regiment). Succeeded Harold Laski as Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics (1951–69) — a pointed succession, since Laski had been a socialist public intellectual and Oakeshott was temperamentally and philosophically opposed to the rationalist projects Laski championed.

Oakeshott published sparingly relative to his influence. Experience and Its Modes (1933) was his only major book before the war; Rationalism in Politics (1962) collected essays written over two decades; On Human Conduct (1975) was his mature philosophical statement; On History (1983) and The Voice of Liberal Learning (1989) followed. Much of his most characteristic work took the form of essays and lectures. Died 19 December 1990 in Acton, Dorset.

Modes of experience

Experience and Its Modes (1933) — written under the influence of F. H. Bradley and British idealism — argues that experience is a whole but that human understanding always operates within a particular mode of abstraction. Oakeshott identifies three modes: history, science, and practice. Each is a self-contained way of engaging with experience, with its own internal coherence and its own criteria of relevance.

History understands the past as past — it seeks to understand what happened on its own terms, not as a source of lessons or predictions. Science seeks to formulate general laws — it abstracts from the particular to the universal. Practice engages the world as something to be changed — it is concerned with what ought to be done.

The modes are not ranked. No mode can judge another by its own standards: science cannot tell history that it should produce laws, and practice cannot tell science that it should be useful. Philosophy, in Oakeshott’s account, is not itself a mode but the attempt to see experience as a whole, without the abstractions that each mode imposes — though this totality is never fully achieved.

The critique of rationalism

“Rationalism in Politics” (1947, collected 1962) is Oakeshott’s most widely read essay. The rationalist in politics believes that all human activity can be governed by technique — by principles formulated in advance and applied from above. The rationalist’s model is the engineer or the scientist: identify the principles, apply them, and the correct result follows.

Oakeshott’s counter-argument rests on his distinction between two kinds of knowledge:

Technical knowledge — knowledge that can be formulated in rules, principles, and propositions. A recipe, a manual, a constitution. This knowledge can be written down, taught in a classroom, and applied by anyone who reads the instructions.

Practical knowledge — knowledge that exists only in practice and cannot be fully articulated. The judgment of a seasoned politician, the touch of a craftsman, the sense of when a situation calls for departure from the rule. This knowledge is acquired not by studying rules but by apprenticeship — by living within a tradition of practice and absorbing its habits of judgment. “It can neither be taught nor learned, but only imparted and acquired. It exists only in practice, and the only way to acquire it is by apprenticeship to a master — not because the master can teach it (he cannot), but because it can be acquired only by continuous contact with one who is perpetually practising it.”

The rationalist mistake is to believe that technical knowledge is the only kind — or that practical knowledge can always be converted into technical knowledge. The consequences are political: the rationalist trusts the blueprint over the tradition, the ideology over the practice, the expert’s formula over the practitioner’s judgment. Oakeshott saw this error at work equally in socialist planning and in free-market ideology — both attempt to govern complex human arrangements by principles derived in advance, without the practical knowledge that only participation in the arrangement can provide.

Civil association

On Human Conduct (1975) develops Oakeshott’s mature political philosophy around a distinction between two ideal types of human association:

Civil association (societas) — persons related to one another not by a shared purpose but by shared rules. The rules specify the terms on which they conduct their separate pursuits — a language of civility, not a plan. No common enterprise binds them; what binds them is the acknowledgment of common conditions of conduct. The state, on this account, is not an enterprise with goals but a framework of rules within which individuals pursue their own goals.

Enterprise association (universitas) — persons associated for a common purpose. A firm, a military unit, a campaign. The association has a goal; the members serve it; the rules are instrumental to the purpose.

Oakeshott argues that the modern state has been increasingly understood as an enterprise association — a vehicle for achieving collective goals (economic growth, social justice, national greatness). This is the political form of rationalism: it treats the state as an organisation to be managed rather than a civil condition to be maintained. The alternative — civil association — is not a programme but a disposition: the recognition that the state’s function is to provide the conditions of civility, not to direct life toward a substantive end.

Where Oakeshott stops

The distinction between technical and practical knowledge is Oakeshott’s most influential contribution and his most contested. The boundary between the two is not as sharp as the essays suggest. Polanyi — whose tacit knowledge parallels Oakeshott’s practical knowledge in important respects — acknowledged a gradient: some tacit knowledge can be made explicit through effort, even if a residue always remains. Oakeshott’s formulation sometimes reads as though the two kinds are categorically distinct, which overstates the case. How much practical knowledge can be articulated, and under what conditions, is an empirical question that Oakeshott’s framework poses but does not investigate.

The “conversation of mankind” — Oakeshott’s metaphor (from the 1959 essay “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind”) for the plurality of human understanding as a conversation among distinct voices (science, history, poetry, practice) — has been pressed on its terms of admission. The voices presuppose a shared cultural formation that functions as a substantive criterion for participation, though Oakeshott does not acknowledge it as such. David Boucher and others have argued that the conversation is aestheticised — it imagines philosophy as polite exchange among educated voices, smoothing away the political and material stakes of intellectual life. The metaphor makes plurality agreeable; it does not address the conditions under which some voices are excluded or the stakes involved when they are. The relationship between the open-ended, purposeless conversation and the rule-bound, purposeless civil association of On Human Conduct also pulls in two directions: the two models share a structure (plurality without a shared goal) but operate at different levels (cultural exchange vs. legal framework), and whether they reinforce each other or work against each other is a question Oakeshott leaves open.

The political philosophy has been pressed from both directions. From the left: civil association as Oakeshott describes it presupposes conditions of equality that it does not itself create — if citizens enter the civil condition with radically unequal resources, the formal equality of shared rules masks a substantive inequality. From the right: Oakeshott’s resistance to enterprise association sits uneasily with conservative commitments to national purpose, military strength, or cultural preservation, all of which require the state to act as an enterprise. Whether civil association is a viable political form or an ideal type that no actual state can sustain is the open question in his reception.

Key works

See also: Polanyi · Gadamer · Wittgenstein