Oakeshott

Otimo artigo/resenha de um livro recente sobre o pensamento do Michael Oakeshott, importante pensador conservador britanico e seus pares americanos...

An obscure college professor once wrote that the reception of English philosopher Michael Oakeshott by American conservatives resembled the sound of one hand clapping. Although interest in Oakeshott’s work among U.S. academic historians and political theorists has increased exponentially since his death in 1990, his influence on public intellectuals and policy makers here has remained negligible—with the notable exception of Andrew Sullivan, who, like Oakeshott, happens to be British.

This lack of influence among the movers and shakers of American political life should not be surprising, given Oakeshott’s insistence on the irrelevance of political philosophy to practical politics. As he once wrote, “reputable political behavior is not dependent upon sound or even coherent philosophy.” Such behavior is instead related to the concrete practical knowledge of an actual political tradition and what such a tradition intimates. Oakeshott was skeptical of philosophers who meddled in practical affairs, insisting that he was not concerned with establishing “a seminary for training political hedge-preachers in some dim orthodoxy.”

Further, Oakeshott’s critique of ideological or rationalistic politics makes him an unlikely source of inspiration to a people whose entire political tradition has been informed by that style of political discourse. The rationalistic or ideological style manifests itself in the abstract and often vacuous pronouncements about foundational principles that animate American political life. As Oakeshott observed in a review of a book by Walter Lippman:

when Mr. Lippmann says that the founders of our free institutions were adherents of the philosophy of natural law, and that ‘the free political institutions of the Western world were conceived and established’ by men who held certain abstract beliefs, he speaks with the shortened perspective of an American way of thinking in which a manner of conducting affairs is inconceivable without an architect and without a premeditated ‘dedication to a proposition.’ But the fact is that nobody ever ‘founded these institutions.’ They are the product of innumerable human choices, over long stretches of time, but not of any human design.

Such a long view is not likely to be welcome in a country that has from the beginning considered itself a novus ordo seclorum.

With these considerations in mind, it was with a great deal of excitement that I read Gene Callahan’s new book, Oakeshott on Rome and America, which is a well-written examination of Oakeshott’s own work, but also a novel application of Oakeshott’s critique of rationalist or ideological politics to American constitutional history. Callahan argues quite convincingly that Oakeshott’s analysis of the errors of modern rationalism is both acute and accurate and that the American constitutional tradition has been informed by a highly rationalistic rhetorical style from the beginning.

So what is rationalism, in the Oakeshottian sense of the term? First, it involves the claim that the only adequate type of knowledge is that which can be reduced to a series of rules, principles, or methods—and thus it is also a claim that “knowing how” to do something is nothing more than “knowing that” the rules are such and such. Second, because of this denigration of practical knowledge, it is a claim that rational action can only take place following the creation of a theoretical model. As Oakeshott once observed, modern rationalism is literally “preposterous” because theoretical reflection can only occur after a practice already has made itself distinct and more or less concrete.

Finally, as Callahan points out, since rationalism is a mistaken description of human knowledge and its relation to human activity, it is also an impossible way of acting, politically or in any other sphere. Human action, including political action, is inherently an engagement of practical reason working within a particular tradition or and attempting to follow through on some of the inchoate suggestions that the vagueness of the practice offers. The opposite of rationalism for Oakeshott is not irrationalism but authentic practical reasonableness. Thus, and contrary to many of his reading-impaired critics, his critique of rationalism is not a critique of reason but a defense of it against a false modern conception of it.

To use one of Oakeshott’s favorite examples, if one has no knowledge of cookery, a cookbook is useless. If, on the other hand, one is an experienced chef, a cookbook is superfluous. The cookbook is relevant only in a situation where either the great majority of cooks are relatively inexperienced and there is a dearth of connoisseurs or in a situation in which the traditions of cookery are in a state of confusion and a reminder is needed of some of the tradition’s neglected resources.

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