Lectures in the History of Political Thought by Michael Oakeshott

Author:Michael Oakeshott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: philosophy, British idealism, political science, history, ancient greeks, ancient romans, medieval, government, modern state, europe, essays
ISBN: 9781845403041
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2011
Published: 2011-10-24T00:00:00+00:00

9 Oakeshott’s marginal note: ‘Cp. Magna Carta.’

Medieval Political Experience

1

Today we begin to consider the third of the political experiences we are concerned with. I have called it the political experience of medieval Europe.

The expression signifies a period of time and a geographical area which came to be inhabited by various peoples.

So far as time is concerned I am going to take it to be the period which begins with the unmistakable collapse of the Roman imperial administration, the end of the pax Romana. The year 400 A.D. is a reasonable proximate date, though in itself it has no significance.

It is impossible to be any more precise about the end of the period, for this medieval political experience shaded imperceptibly into that of modern Europe—that is to say into the political experience we recognize as our own. But the year 1500 A.D. (which also has no significance in itself) may be taken as the approximate end.

Both these dates are so approximate that each of them might be moved a century either way.

It is, then, a period of something over a thousand years.

It is a little easier to be precise about the geographical area. It may be said to be the political experience of the people who came to inhabit the northern and western parts of the Roman world ( orbis terrarum Romanorum ), namely (from north to south)—Britain, Gaul, Germany west of the Rhine, Spain, and Italy.

When I say that the political experience we are concerned with is that of the peoples who came to inhabit this territory, I mean that it was the political culture acquired by the people who, from the second century A.D., gradually moved into this territory and who mixed with the peoples who already occupied it.

And this political culture distinguished itself from those of ancient Greece and Rome:

• In respect of the dimensions of the territory over which it spread itself

• In respect of the size of the populations concerned

• In respect of the slowness with which it emerged

Now the two important features of this world which these peoples encountered as they moved into it were (1) that it was still significantly Roman, and (2) that it was Christian; and both these features impressed themselves indelibly upon the immigrants and conditioned their political experience.

(1) From its Roman inheritance, medieval Europe acquired a language—the Latin language. This became the language of European law and of medieval political reflection. So far as politics is concerned, the importance of this lies in the fact that it was a vocabulary which already displayed Roman thoughts, and when these peoples, in the course of time, made it a vehicle for their own thoughts, they were unable to exclude (indeed, they did not attempt to exclude) the Roman thoughts which the language carried with it. Nevertheless, these thoughts were transformed in their new context.

With the language, what medieval Europe acquired from Rome was a past-relationship with a Roman civilization in terms of which they came to understand themselves. Even for the immigrant

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