Michael Oakeshott and the Cambridge School on the History of Political Thought

Martyn P. Thompson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781032092430
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315443744
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book is a critique of Cambridge School Historical Contextualism as the currently dominant mode of history of political thought, drawing upon Michael Oakeshott's analysis of the logic of historical enquiry.

While acknowledging that the early Cambridge School work represented a considerable advance towards genuinely historical histories of political thought, this work identifies two major historiographical problems that have become increasingly acute. The first is general: an insufficiently rigorous understanding of the key concept of "pastness" necessarily presupposed in historical enquiry of all kinds. The second is specific to histories of political thought: a failure to do justice to the varieties of past political thinking, especially differences between ideology and philosophy. In addressing these problems, the author offers a comprehensive account of the history of political thought that establishes the parameters not just of histories of ideological thinking but also of the much disputed character of histories of political philosophy. Since rethinking history of political thought in Oakeshottian terms requires resisting current pressures to turn history into the servant of currently felt needs, the book offers a sustained defence of the cultural value of modernist historical enquiry against its opponents.

An important work for political theorists, historians of political thought and those researching intellectual history, the philosophy of history and proposed new directions in contemporary historical studies.

Part I

Two historiographical problems in search of solutions

1 Introduction

The two problems

It is widely acknowledged that the remarkable advances in the theory and practice of intellectual history, especially the history of political thought, over the past half-century have been due primarily to the work of Quentin Skinner, John Pocock and a host of other practitioners of “Cambridge School” or “Cambridge-style” historical contextualism.¹ But for all the considerable gains that have been made, especially in historical accounts of early modern European and British political thought, two longstanding criticisms of Cambridge-style intellectual history remain unanswered. These criticisms focus on two problems that I propose to reconsider. The problems have become increasingly apparent in recent years (since the so-called “normative” and “rhetorical” turns in Cambridge-style history), especially with respect to Skinner’s highly influential work on Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651).² The first problem threatens the coherence of Cambridge-style history and the second unnecessarily limits its scope. Michael Oakeshott was among the earliest critics to identify these problems.³ In re-examining them, my aim is to show how Oakeshott’s work on the logic of historical enquiry and on the identity of histories of political thought⁴ clarifies both problems and overcomes them. In short, I offer an Oakeshottian critique of Cambridge-style history, one that acknowledges its achievements while defending conventional historical enquiry against its many current critics. What are the two problems?

The first is inconsistency with respect to the historicity or “historicality” of the kind of past studied by intellectual historians, including historians of political thought. The basic problem here concerns the nature and implications of the conception of the past that is the major defining characteristic of all forms of modern, disciplined historical study. As is often noted, history is not the same thing as the past understood as everything that has ever happened in the world.⁵ Rather, history is a specific way of conceptualizing and thinking about the past. It is a distinctive way of studying the past where the past is construed in a specifically historical way. Initially, Skinner and Pocock seemed committed to a categorical distinction between two mutually exclusive conceptions of the past, one of which was taken to be historical, the other not. Roughly speaking, the first was the past created by historians. It was the outcome of historical research aimed at understanding past occurrences in their own past terms. It was what Oakeshott long ago identified as the “historical past” as opposed to other, non-historical conceptions of the past, especially the “practical past.”⁶ The historical past was constructed by applying the techniques of disciplined historical enquiry to surviving relics, archival materials and other “sources” available for analysis in the historian’s present. On the working assumptions of historians, all of which were philosophically questionable but nonetheless perfectly serviceable for conducting historical research, this historical past was understood to be an erstwhile present that was now dead and gone. It was also commonly thought to be in some sense an objective past, the past as it really had been. And further, because it was a past that was dead and gone, it was construed as being different in practically all respects from any resemblances or apparent counterparts in the historian’s present-day, living world. On this view, then, the historical past could be considered a “foreign country” where people did everything differently (as L.P. Hartley’s much quoted metaphor has it).

The second conception of the past was the everyday, non-technical conception that Skinner and Pocock (as well as Oakeshott) rejected as non-historical. Here the past was understood as a living past, not a dead past. It was the past that had survived into the present and, since it had survived (in the form of memory, myth, legend, marvel, miracle, model or monstrosity), it could serve useful purposes for the conduct of present day affairs. This is what Oakeshott called the “practical past.” Because the “historical past” was defined both as dead and gone and as a foreign country in which everything was done differently, it could not possibly provide, at least not directly, any useful guidance for the conduct of present day affairs. But the “practical past,” by contrast, because it was understood as a living past, a past that somehow infused the present, a past composed of all kinds of memorable relics, models to be followed and monstrosities to be avoided, was exactly the kind of past from which useful, immediately applicable, lessons might be drawn.

This fairly familiar distinction or something very much like it clearly underpinned Skinner’s and Pocock’s early attacks upon the unhistorical, present-oriented character of the dominant mode of studying past political thought in the 1950s and 1960s. In this once dominant mode, chronologically arranged canonical texts were studied for the “timeless wisdom” they supposedly contained.⁷ Both Skinner and Pocock argued very effectively that contemporary philosophical or pseudo-philosophical analyses of canonical texts were not historical enquiries. They were at best just different kinds of enquiries from a historian’s concern to identify the historical meanings of past texts (canonical and non-canonical) by placing them within the relevant, historically constructed past contexts of their original articulation and first appearance. To read past texts in search of trans-historical wisdom was an entirely different, non-historical enterprise from reading those texts in historically constructed contexts in order to elicit their past meanings and the past significance they were once accorded. The former was bound to distort what the texts had originally meant. Only the latter could identify the original range of their authorial intended meanings. The former enquiry consigned its texts to a practical past, a past of enduring wisdom in which the pastness of the past was of minor significance or none at all. All that mattered was what the texts could be made to contribute to an understanding of today’s world. The latter enquiry consigned its texts to a historical past in which the pastness of the past, the difference between the past and the present, was of paramount significance. What mattered here was what the texts originally meant and thus what they revealed about past worlds, worlds that had long since disappeared.⁸

But in their subsequent reflections, indebted in part to various postmodernist critiques of disciplined historical enquiry, Skinner and Pocock have blurred these initial distinctions.⁹ Skinner has come to conceive of the history of political thinking as a kind of contemporary political theory and Pocock, more ambiguously, has begun to talk of historians as themselves political actors and of historiography as a “form of political thought.”¹⁰ The central question that needs to be revisited here is “what are the relationships between historical pasts and the historian’s present that are logically presupposed in disciplined historical studies of past political thinking?” In answering this question, I shall argue that the logic of modern historical enquiry requires the reaffirmation of the categorical distinction between the past orientation of historical understanding and the present-future orientation of contemporary philosophical analysis and normative political theorizing. The historical past constructed by disciplined historical enquiry is categorically different from the practical past used in contemporary political theorizing as a resource for guidance for contemporary political action. On this view, it is a recipe for intellectual confusion to regard history as essentially a sub-branch of contemporary political theory and to consider the study of history to be a form of contemporary political thought or action.¹¹

The second problem concerns the varieties of past political thinking and the implications of this diversity for historians of political thought. The main issue here has focused on whether histories of political philosophy differ in any significant respects from histories of other kinds of political thinking, especially practical-political or ideological thinking. No one doubts that political thinking has always taken place at a variety of different levels of specificity, generality and abstraction from the cut-and-thrust of everyday political assertion, argument or advocacy.¹² No one doubts that political ideas have been expressed and analysed in different ways and for different purposes in a variety of different kinds of works (historical, social scientific, literary-imaginative, ideological, philosophical and so on). And furthermore, no one doubts that political ideas have been expressed in all or practically all of the many different genres of the literary, performing and visual arts. But despite all this diversity, Skinner has repeatedly insisted that the history of political thought should be understood only as a “history of ideologies.” He has done so mainly, it seems, because he is convinced that “ideological motivations” underlie “even the most abstract systems of thought.” Pocock, too, has remarked that the historian’s business is “to consider all thought as ideology,” that is, as “thought considered as historically concrete.”¹³

But if all this variety of explanatory, elucidatory, evaluative, exhortatory, expressive, imaginative, factual and fictional political literature is to be subsumed under the rubric of ideology, then the concept of ideology must be much more expansive than it is usually taken to be, especially in discourse concerned to explain political occurrences, ideas, activities and institutions. Skinner noted, in response to some of his critics, that he used the term ideology “not in a Marxist sense to refer to distortions of social reality, but rather in a Weberian sense to refer to discourses of legitimation.”¹⁴ But this hardly answers the criticism that his concept of ideology is excessively expansive. That concept intentionally collapses conventional distinctions between political philosophy and political ideology by claiming that both are political actions performing the same kinds of “political tasks.”¹⁵ This rejects, for reasons no historian can accept,¹⁶ the much more common view that although philosophy and ideology are indeed activities or practices, they are activities of different kinds undertaken in pursuit of very different goals. At a minimum, ideology is concerned to affect political action in the contingent circumstances of practical-political life, whereas political philosophy is concerned to dispel conceptual confusions in the use of political language and to explain the place of political activity in the world of human endeavour of all kinds. As Michael Freeden, one of the leading contemporary scholars of political ideologies, reminded his readers some time ago:

we need to appreciate that an ideology is a rather different intellectual venture than a political philosophy. It is, above all, a political tool situated firmly within the political domain. … Were we to direct the full power of philosophical and logical analysis and of ethical evaluation at most ideological material, that material would collapse under the pressure.¹⁷

From very early on, one of the recurring criticisms of Cambridge-style historical contextualism has been its tendency to interpret works of political philosophy as if they were just exercises in ideological or practical-political thinking. Several critics from the early 1970s to the present have noted, for example, that too rigid a distinction between “historicist history and ahistorical political philosophy” and too narrow a focus on the “practical-polemical context as the only guide to [historical] interpretation” rendered Cambridge-style history blind to the character or even the possibility of genuinely historical histories of political philosophy. Political philosophy was here understood as a distinctive, explanatory kind of intellectual activity taking place in historical time.¹⁸ The point of most of this criticism was not to deny the historical credentials of Cambridge-style histories of practical-political thinking, thinking of an exhortatory kind (a guide to action) within the political domain. It was rather to underline that in both theory and practice, the proponents of Cambridge-style history had unnecessarily and arbitrarily restricted the scope of their enquiries in historically counter-productive ways.¹⁹ The central question raised by these criticisms is “what, if anything, are the distinguishing characteristics of histories of past philosophical thinking about politics as compared to histories of past ideological thinking in political conflicts and as contributions to practical-political debates?” As most contemporary theorists of the history of philosophy attest, there is as yet no consensus about an answer to this question.²⁰ I shall argue that this absence of consensus reflects the unavoidable tension between two incompatible conceptions of the history of philosophy: histories of philosophy philosophically conceived; and histories of philosophy historically conceived.²¹ Only the latter captures the essential characteristics of genuinely historical histories of past political philosophy.²²

These, then, are the two problems that I propose to re-examine: the one concerned with the pastness of past political thought; the other concerned w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• About the author
• Preface and acknowledgements
• PART I: Two historiographical problems in search of solutions
• 1. Introduction: The two problems
• 2. Logic and method in intellectual history
• PART II: The pastness of past political thinking
• 3. The “pastness” of the historical past
• 4. Oakeshott on the history of political thought
• 5. Pocock and Skinner on Oakeshott
• PART III: The varieties of past political thinking
• 6. Hobbes’s Leviathan: Ideology and philosophy
• 7. The logic of the history of political philosophy
• 8. Conclusion: The use and abuse of history
• Index