Faces of Moderation by Aurelian Craiutu

Author:Aurelian Craiutu
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Published: 2017-04-05T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

Moderation and Trimming

Michael Oakeshott’s Politics of Skepticism

The business of a government [is] not to inflame passion and give it new objects to feed upon, but to inject into the activities of already too passionate men an ingredient of moderation.

—Michael Oakeshott

Neither Too High nor Too Low

Born at the outset of a century that will be remembered in history for its unprecedented cruelty and destruction, Michael Oakeshott (1901–90) must have had few reasons to feel at home in a world dominated by anxious prophets of extremity, confident heralds of salvation and doom, and self-righteous philistines. A philosopher and bohemian spirit interested in exotic topics such as love, poetry, and horse betting (on which he coauthored a book), he might have easily sought refuge in philosophy, theology, literature, or art in order to escape the terror of history. Instead, Oakeshott chose what in hindsight appears as a much harder route. He proceeded to rethink the nature and ends of politics in the hope that by entering into a conversation with his contemporaries, he might be able moderate their propensity to radicalism and zeal for perfection. Central to Oakeshott’s political thinking, culminating in his masterpiece On Human Conduct (1975), were his defense of moderation and lifelong opposition to all forms of ideological politics, whether they came from the Left or the Right. He was a political moderate keenly aware of what was afoot in his own age and ready to stand up for the values he cherished.1

For all of his romantic longings and bohemian sensibility that came to light so vividly in his recently published Notebooks (2014), Oakeshott had a distinctive political temperament, complemented by a strong penchant for introspection, irony, and, at times, hyperbole. His writings represented an effort to know and discover himself, which he considered as the highest and most difficult task.2 Here is, for example, an interesting Socratic fragment from Oakeshott’s notebooks: “To discover yourself. Sometimes this is achieved only formally—the discovery of a vocation, or a skill. But to discover yourself fully is to find freedom; and until this discovery is made all freedom is frivolity” (2014: 326). He often looked more patrician than he really was and preferred to maintain a certain distance from real politics. Although generally regarded as a conservative, Oakeshott did not identify himself with a political party and made a point of writing with the independence of someone who seeks to read into the nature of things and tries to understand them without taking on the role of a maître à penser. Nevertheless, he was often reluctant to use the word “intellectual,” was skeptical toward academic fashions, and had few illusions about the effectiveness of intellectuals’ political ideas. To be sure, Oakeshott’s deflationary critique of the involvement of intellectuals in politics was quite ecumenical and spared no one. If he was harsh with his colleagues on the Left who imagined politics as a vast enterprise to improve mankind and reshape human nature, he also thought that many of his friends on the Right had succumbed, often unbeknownst to them, to the same rationalistic fallacy.

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