Michael Oakeshott and the Conversation of Modern Political Thought

Luke Philip Plotica

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781438455341, 9781438455358
• eBook ISBN: 9781438455365
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

One of the seminal voices of twentieth-century political thought, Michael Oakeshott's work has often fallen prey to the ideological labels applied to it by his interpreters and commentators. In this book, Luke Philip Plotica argues that we stand to learn more by embracing Oakeshott's own understanding of his work as contributions to an ever-evolving conversation of humanity. Building from Oakeshott's concept of conversation as an engagement among a plurality of voices "without symposiarch or arbiter" to dictate its course, Plotica explores several fundamental and recurring themes of Oakeshott's philosophical and political writings: individual agency, tradition, the state, and democracy. When viewed as interventions into an ongoing conversation of modern political thought, Oakeshott's work transcends the limits of familiar ideological labels, and his thought opens into deeper engagement with some of the most significant thinkers of the twentieth century, including Ludwig Wittgenstein, Charles Taylor, Michel Foucault, and Hannah Arendt. Attending to these often unexpected or unrecognized affinities casts fresh light on some of Oakeshott's most familiar ideas and their systematic relations, and facilitates a better understanding of the breadth and depth of his political thought.

ONE

LANGUAGE, PRACTICE, AND INDIVIDUAL AGENCY

A culture is built by the piling of individual testimony on individual testimony in a long tradition.

—Stuart Hampshire, Innocence and Experience

We believe, so to speak, that this great building exists, and then we see, now here, now there, one or another small corner of it.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty

Throughout the long span of his career, Michael Oakeshott frequently turned to the individual person as the locus of philosophical and political analysis. In his two most expansive and systematic works, Experience and Its Modes (1933) and On Human Conduct (1975), as well as in the essays collected as Rationalism in Politics (1962) and On History (1983), the individual is the abiding protagonist. Even when “the totality of experience” is the object of philosophical analysis, this cannot be explained without accounting for the “self, replete with opinion, prejudice, habit, knowledge [that] is implied in every actual experience[, for] to exclude this self from any experience whatever is an absolute impossibility.”¹ Likewise, Oakeshott’s account of the “modern European state” is inseparable from his account of the individuals therein associated.² Yet it is not merely the abstract individual (the individual as philosophical placeholder) that matters to Oakeshott. Rather, it is the individual as a thinking and acting subject, as a concrete historic person who is the (only) protagonist of the epic of human conduct.³ Indeed, human conduct cannot be made intelligible without recognizing and exploring the ineluctable sense in which each individual is an agent, an intelligent, self-disclosing and self-enacting doer. Oakeshott’s systematic view of agency, developed over many decades, returns again and again to the interrelated roles of concepts and practices in what and how individuals think and do. It is in respect of his rich account of agency as having its own grammars or languages that I believe Oakeshott’s work stands to inform and be informed by the later philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Each thinker develops a view of agency that is essentially a kind of language-use, both literally and metaphorically, and the terms in which they present their respective views of language, practice, and agency complement one another, such that much is to be learned from listening to what they each have to say on a number of common themes. While several of these have been explored, to various conclusions, there is a good deal more to be gathered from a conversation between these two thinkers.

FRAMING THE CONVERSATION

Numerous commentators have identified affinities between Oakeshott and Wittgenstein on a range of philosophical topics, and have most often framed the encounter in one of two ways. First, Oakeshott and Wittgenstein have been addressed to one another in virtue of their general philosophical styles or attitudes. Commentators have repeatedly argued that the two embrace fundamentally similar approaches to understanding and doing philosophy, specifically in opposition to a prevailing philosophical “rationalism” stretching from Descartes to twentieth-century analytic philosophy.⁴ Second, Oakeshott and Wittgenstein have been addressed to one another in virtue of their accounts of the conditions of agency and community. Here the two are presented as sharing a concern with the ways in which rules structure and set the bounds of what individuals can say, do, and mean. This approach represents both thinkers as theorists of a situated self, whose identity, capacities, and horizons are drawn largely by the boundaries of the community in which the individual dwells. Some commentators, such as Richard Flathman, have interpreted this affinity in thought between Oakeshott and Wittgenstein fairly liberally, suggesting that the two similarly understand the inner workings and conditions of agency and community but nonetheless understand individual agency as articulated against the shared background of rules and community.⁵ Others, such as David Bloor, J. C. Nyíri, and Richard Rorty, have interpreted Oakeshott and Wittgenstein as essentially conservative thinkers, advocates of the community and its customs or rules over and against the individual agent. These two approaches to Oakeshott and Wittgenstein—sketching their critiques of rationalism and their views of situated agency—often converge on the notion that practice underlies theory, and thus that philosophy can at most describe ways of living that are already present in actual human communities. Although there are some who understand Oakeshott and Wittgenstein as describing the conditions of robust individual agency, the majority of interpreters who read the two as addressing a family of overlapping concerns understand them to be essentially conservative thinkers (both philosophically and politically) who privilege practice over philosophy, and the rules and authority of the community over the choices and claims of the individual.⁶

My aim in this chapter is to review and reimagine the conversation between Oakeshott and Wittgenstein, both to identify and clarify their affinities and to challenge a view of individual agency that is common to many readings of the two as kindred, conservative thinkers. From their views of individual agency as ineluctably framed by intersubjective practices of speaking and acting, the claim is often derived that individual agents cannot help but manifest and reproduce robust forms of agreement with the conventions and traditions of their community. This proposition is frequently taken as evidence that critical agency (e.g., in politics) is either illusory or incoherent. J. C. Nyíri and David Bloor are perhaps the clearest and most consistent advocates of such a view.⁷ However, something like this view has become common to most conservative interpreters of Oakeshott and Wittgenstein, yet it also continues to capture the imagination of readers who may not be partisans in any interpretive debate, and thus shapes the reception of Oakeshott and Wittgenstein in political and social thought.

I believe that the conversation between Oakeshott and Wittgenstein can be fruitfully restaged, so as to clarify both the depth of affinity between them as well as the implications of their work for political theory and practice. I shall argue that there is adequate textual evidence to reject the conservative reading and thus its political implications. I suggest that if one considers the characterizations of individual agency and its conditions presented in Wittgenstein’s and Oakeshott’s respective works, then one finds that their discussions of agency intimate and support a deeply individualistic understanding of agency premised upon but not determined by a larger intersubjective background or network of shared concepts and practices. Ultimately, my aim is twofold: first, to construct an account of individual agency that recognizes its intersubjective, social conditions, yet views these conditions from an individualistic perspective, and second, to challenge a common association drawn between Wittgenstein and Oakeshott which suggests that their intellectual affinities are deeply conservative in tenor, and that their respective works present the individual agent as imprisoned within an edifice of convention that is itself beyond the reach of critical reflection and action. I will approach the former by way of the latter.

In order to provide a consistent point of view from which to consider the work of Wittgenstein and Oakeshott, I will employ a useful if simple distinction between individualistic and social theories of agency.⁸ Individualistic theories of agency generally emphasize the individual’s capacity to act, a capacity that is not reducible to or fully determinable by an individual’s context of action. The most common and familiar individualistic theories of agency that inform the contemporary study of politics (though, as I will show, by no means the only such available) are rational choice theories, social choice theories, and their kin.⁹ While such theories do not altogether discount the ways in which individual agency and action are conditioned externally, they treat agency as importantly self-contained, driven by individual rationality, preferences, and calculations, and importantly independent of the hurly-burly of life to which action is a response. What I am calling social theories of agency generally stress the intersubjective conditions and context of individual agency and action. Individual agency is treated as explicable in terms of conditions beyond the agent herself, and thus more or less derivative of some larger social field of traditions, systems, forces, and relations exogenous to the agent.¹⁰

The tensions between individualistic and social theories of agency, and their applications in political theory, are readily apparent, if not always well documented or explored. While the tensions are genuine, the delineation of one approach from another is often a secondary concern, a trope used to emphasize or amplify other points of contention (such as how best to understand and organize democratic institutions, how best to understand and institutionalize political and legal rights, or how best to defend or undermine particular identities and traditions). Given the secondary status ordinarily afforded to agency as a chip wagered in larger theoretical games, accounts of agency are often assumed and categorized quickly and starkly in reflection on politics, so as to settle the issue of agency at the outset (sometimes by denying the possibility of a middle ground or meaningful debate) and move on to the topics that the respective theorists really intend to discuss. Thus, while theoretical divisions regarding agency are real and, I would add, important, they often receive rather partisan lip service, and often remain among the less developed aspects of any political theory.

With this as my guiding conceptual scheme, I begin, in the next section, by characterizing broadly the affinities I wish to identify between Oakeshott and Wittgenstein, which form the foundation of the view of individual agency I will present. In the subsequent section I consider an influential conservative reading of Oakeshott and Wittgenstein, which presents them as unwavering advocates of a social theory of agency. By way of criticizing this reading I will challenge the conservative claims upon Oakeshott and Wittgenstein and further articulate the theory of agency that I draw from their work. Lastly, in the final section, I consider several of the implications of this theory for our understanding of critical reflection and action in politics.

COMPLEMENTARY VISIONS OF LANGUAGE, PRACTICE, AND CONVENTION

Though there is no direct biographical or textual link between their respective projects,¹¹ if one looks at the world through the respective conceptual lenses fashioned by Michael Oakeshott (in his work of the 1950s to the 1980s) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (in his work of the 1930s to the 1950s), then one sees strikingly similar pictures. Each viewed the human world not as an inert array of discovered and immutable facts, but rather as an understood world, hard-won through the circumstantial utterances and actions of countless individuals. What is more, the utterances and actions of persons are inexorably structured by the conceptual-practical framework that (following Wittgenstein) one could simply call language. That is, for both Oakeshott and Wittgenstein, the human world is a world in language—understood, inhabited, and experienced through the inexorable mediating influence of concepts and practices whose use constitutes language-use in the broadest sense.¹² According to this perspective, to look systematically at the world is to scrutinize, more or less explicitly, the conceptual and practical frameworks of language that overlay and organize it in experience. The study of human conduct requires attention to language-use, and parsing human conduct into various domains means investigating various practices of language-use engaged in by individuals in the contingent circumstances they encounter. Thus, for Oakeshott and Wittgenstein, the regularities and systematic structures of the world we understand and act within are (intelligible as) the regularities and systematic structures of language. The later careers of both thinkers comprise projects of applying this general perspective to a variety of intellectual domains, questions, confusions, and problems, on topics ranging from logic, mathematics, and skepticism to history, politics, and theories of action. For present purposes I need only to sketch the contours of the linguistic perspective that I argue these two thinkers share, and which informs and suffuses their respective works.

First, the great diversity and complexity of conduct, different kinds of utterance and action in different kinds of circumstances, can be understood perspicuously in terms of different idioms of language-use. Oakeshott commonly referred to such idioms of speaking and acting as “practices,” while Wittgenstein gave them the name “language-games.” Practices or language-games are the conceptual-practical structures that frame and ground understanding and agency—they are, so to speak, the air that understanding and agency necessarily breathe. Wittgenstein never offered a systematic definition of a language-game, though much of Philosophical Investigations and posthumously edited and published works such as On Certainty and Zettel consist of demonstrative reflections on language-games. Nevertheless, one could say that for Wittgenstein a language-game is an acquired or learned technique of thinking and acting.¹³ Cast in this light, utterances and actions are uses of a technique, an agent following and drawing upon one or another linguistic practice. Somewhat more precisely and systematically, Oakeshott states that a “practice”

may be identified as a set of considerations, manners, uses, observances, customs, standards, canon’s maxims, principles, rules, and offices specifying useful procedures or denoting obligations or duties which relate to human actions and utterances. It is [an] adverbial qualification of choices and performances, more or less complicated, in which conduct is understood in terms of a procedure.¹⁴

Though their formulations differ in terminology and systematicity, both view the structure of utterance and action in terms of techniques of language-use. As Oakeshott claimed, practices or language-games specify “arts of agency” that individuals employ in conduct as they craft themselves, their actions, and their world.¹⁵ Though these techniques are in some ways constraining, in the sense that they regulate as well as constitute idioms of activity, they are not scripts to be parroted. A competent language-user is the “master of a technique” that constitutes and adverbially conditions a “capacity” (Können) for intelligent choice and action.¹⁶ Thus viewed, a practice or language-game should be understood as “an instrument to be played upon, not a tune to be played.”¹⁷ To speak and act is to make use of the arts of agency afforded by the language-games one has mastered; to understand or make sense of the actions of others is to understand or make sense of the linguistic practices they use, the language-games they play.

Second, Oakeshott and Wittgenstein recognize the intersubjective, social dimension of language-games. As Wittgenstein puts it, our linguistic practices rest upon and illustrate a broadly social, intersubjective substrate, which he calls our “forms of life.”¹⁸ That is, our language-games and the arts of agency they constitute and regulate are conventional or customary to a group of language-users. Such arts of agency are in the first and most important instance lear...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Situating Oakeshott
• Chapter One: Language, Practice, and Individual Agency
• Chapter Two: Individuality between Tradition and Contingency
• Chapter Three: Imagining the Modern State
• Chapter Four: Toward a Conversational Democratic Ethos
• Conclusion: Hearing Voices
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover